At Tasktop, we talk about Tasktop Gateway to solve a multitude of problems, but mainly it’s centered on the development and testing side of the DevOps lifecycle. So what about the IT teams who also play an integral role in software delivery? Luckily, Tasktop Gateway can help them as well.
As an example, the short video below shows how Vagrant and Windows PowerShell can be used to track virtual machines that have been provisioned on the developer’s machines to allow compliance and security notifications to be sent to the specific users based on the information that was tracked in a JIRA issue.
The power of Tasktop Gateway shines when you upgrade your ALM system and the API changes, as there is no configuration needed for your scripts and the Gateway endpoint remains the same. Alternatively, if you decide to change to a new tool like ServiceNow, a simple change to the integration will allow all of the existing scripts to continue working where traditionally this would require modifying all setup and configuration scripts.
In case you don’t know these tools, Vagrant allows teams to generate a definition of how to create and manage VMs (including how to set up the OS environment) ensuring that it is reproducible. Windows PowerShell on the other hand is a task automation and configuration management tool providing a scripting language that allows Microsoft Windows systems to perform a variety of tasks.
By using these tools together, whenever a VM is instantiated by Vagrant, the PowerShell script can be run to perform the necessary operation against Tasktop Gateway. Don’t use Windows? Don’t like PowerShell? Tasktop Gateway only requires that you can POST a simple JSON payload to a URL, meaning that you can even use cURL if you want! Check out the video below for this IT automation “magic” that makes tracking virtual machines painless!
