The practice of DevOps isn’t just about automated builds and deployments.  There are several stages to good governance over your software, including a critical step many miss: Monitoring and Continuous Learning.

Without this critical piece of the process you won’t be able to proactively heal issues before they are out of control, and you won’t understand actual usage of the system.

This is the last installment in our AX Build Automation series.  In part 1, we discussed how to install a continuous deployment software suite, in part 2 we discussed the classes we had to modify to harness the Startup Commands to prepare a modelstore, and finally today we will demonstrate how to automate it all together.

Continuous Deployment with AX is a two part gig.  First you need a building software like Microsoft's Release Management or JetBrain's Team City ( covered in part 1 ).  Second, you need to be able to call all of the building activities within AX itself such as synchronizing with Version Control, x++ compile, CIL compile, and so on.  This is what we will cover today, and will follow up with how to automate the entire process ( part 3 ).

Hey everyone, it's been a few since my last update so I wanted to make it count   We just recently launched our global upgrade of AX 2012 RTM to R3, and it went off without a hitch thanks to a rockstar crew, management and process owners who took charge and made huge commitments to testing, and an organized overall approach.  The first two elements come from working at a great company, and the last comes from careful thought and planning.  It's our approach that I'd like to review with you today.