PowerOn Pipelines — CI/CD for the Symitar Core

PowerOn Pipelines is an extension for Azure DevOps which brings managed releases and version control to Symitar, the Jack Henry™ credit union core platform.

What can I do with PowerOn Pipelines?

Keep your organization's production code safe with the tasks in PowerOn Pipelines. With PowerOn Pipelines, you can begin to create true CI/CD for your PowerOn files—that deploy, intall, and even validate your PowerOns all through an Azure Pipeline.

Here are the capabilities that are available and coming to PowerOn Pipelines:

• Symitar integration over SSH - uses our SSH connector to safely and securely deploy, install, and validate PowerOn within an Azure Pipeline
• Symitar integration over HTTPs - uses our HTTPs connector to safely and securely (as well as quickly) deploy, install, and validate PowerOn within an Azure Pipeline

Symitar integration over SSH

Connect directly to your Symitar core over SSH through an Azure Pipeline to validate PowerOns when a PR is opened or even deploy & install when they're complete.

Available Tasks:

• SynchronizePowerOnSSH - uses SSH to synchronize your PowerOn directory with the branch of your choosing in your Symitar repository
• ValidatePowerOnSSH - uses SSH to validate PowerOn files which have modified between branches in your Symitar repository

Symitar integration over HTTPs

Similar functionality to that of our SSH connector, just uses a really fast API over HTTPs to install and validate your PowerOns.

Available Tasks:

• SynchronizePowerOnHTTPs - uses SSH/HTTPs to synchronize your PowerOn directory with the branch of your choosing in your Symitar repository
• ValidatePowerOnHTTPs - uses HTTPs for the fastest validation of PowerOn files that have been modified between branches in your Symitar repository

Usage

This section provides a quick overview of the primary use cases for the tasks available in PowerOn Pipelines. Be sure to also check out our official PowerOn Pipeline Docs ✨

With PowerOn Pipelines, your organization gains version control for the Symitar environment and the ability to have managed releases through native Azure DevOps role-based approvals. We will also soon be releasing Deployment Protections within PowerOn Pro giving your org the flexibility to prevent deployments to target Syms and gate everything through Azure DevOps using Prod, UAT, and Staging environments.

The Symitar repository

Your organization will need to have a central Symitar repository which will be the source of truth for what should exist on your remote Symitar host.

In the repository, you can place all PowerOn files under a configurable directory. In the screenshot above, we chose to take the default REPWRITERSPECS/ which mirrors the remote directory name on the Symitar host.

Note: For the moment, we just support PowerOn deployments since HelpFiles, LetterFiles, and DataFiles have additional complexity we'll tackle in future releases.

Making PowerOn changes

The intent behind our validation tasks is that prior to checking in a PR, and when creating an official build, the updated PowerOns can be validated to ensure they function properly after deployment.

If you've managed to forget to validate a PowerOn prior to upstreaming the changes, these tasks will prevent those changes from getting too far in the development lifecycle. Once you've identified if any PowerOn needs attention, you can publish new changes to get them fixed.

After completing the PR, you can also do a final check for changed PowerOns between check ins when creating the Official Build for Symitar.

Deploying PowerOn to different stages

Manage the state of any Sym using build artifacts from your Symitar repository that works both forwards and backwards in time. Additionally, you can run in a dry run mode to observe the changes prior to physically deploying them.

Create a classic release pipeline to deploy build artifacts to your Prod, UAT, and Staging environments. As mentioned above, you can include a Validation stage that instructs an engineer to view & sign-off on the dry run results prior to giving the final deployment approval.

Contributing

We at Libum are committed to improving the software development process of Jack Henry™ credit unions. The best way for you to contribute / get involved is communicate ways we can improve the PowerOn Pipelines feature set.

Please share your thoughts with us through our Feedback Portal, on our Libum Community Discord, or at development@libum.io