By Shane Hadden
Improving Customer Success Through Orchestration
Here at Pliant, if there’s a challenge we come across, our go-to solution is our own platform. This week, the IT team was helping QA with testing the Pliant Air-Gap installation package. We use this installer for those customers who must deploy Pliant in a location without Internet access. Previously, this test process was an ordeal that involved building a VM in vCenter, downloading the installation package to it, blocking its Internet access at the firewall, then installing software and checking its health via a series of commands over SSH. A lot of swivel chair config.
The entire process consistently took a few hours of valuable time away from everything else the IT team had on their plate.
Pliant to the Rescue – of Pliant
Using the Pliant Orchestration Platform and its ever-growing menu of API and CLI action blocks, we spent about as much time as it would take to manually execute the test to build a repeatable workflow that we can now use every time we need to test a new build.
As icing on the cake, we used the Plaint API gateway to set up a webhook trigger for the workflow, and now anybody on the QA team can simply click a link on a Confluence page and the Airgap test instance gets a fully automated rebuild with the latest code — no IT person’s time involved! Pliant carries out the detailed and customized process by orchestrating all the API calls and CLI commands to vCenter, the lab firewall, the Linux host, Kubernetes, and the Pliant API. Pass or fail, results, and detailed output from each step are sent directly to QA in an email when the process completes.
When you’re technical, you don’t want an automation platform that limits you to one vendor, you want something that gives you the power to make everything in your environment work together and the flexibility to build out your process your way right away. It’s fun to work with our customers, both internal and external and see the ways they use Pliant to make life easier.
Pliant and You
To learn how you can use Pliant to solve challenges in your world, check out our free-to-use Community Edition or reach out; I’m happy to share more about what I’ve learned!
