Master DevOps Integration With Your Genesys PureEngage Platform

This post was co-authored by the InProd team for Genesys AppFoundry.

In a world where the rate of change continues to accelerate, the need for more efficient change management has never been more important. In this fast-paced economy, businesses that still operate on a traditional methodology where customer experience platforms receive quarterly or annual updates face hard roads ahead.

DevOps is a fundamental ideology that improves agility, speed and collaboration to move software releases into production quicker by tightly integrating IT development and IT operation teams. DevOps successfully drives faster change iterations while increasing release quality. But it can be difficult to apply DevOps methodologies to contact center software that was not architected in the modern age of DevOps.

To bridge the gap between infrastructure and engineering, a toolset is needed to magnify the business value of your Genesys contact center platform. Infrastructure experts shouldn’t be expected to also become Genesys experts—and vice versa. Genesys® PureEngage^TM customers can integrate with InProd to accelerate the rate of change while increasing quality.

With InProd, engineers can use familiar tools to achieve their DevOps goals. InProd records their changes, which can be imported into an InProd Changeset, to automatically generate change-control documentation and enforce release management processes. Features include:

Configuration Auditing

• Tracks every Genesys config object and parameter
• Unlimited audit history events
• Revert change, restore to point in time or even cherry pick
• Compare objects, even if they are in different environments
• Interactive audit reporting

Changeset Features

• Easily promote changes between environments
• Automatically generate change-control documentation
• Validation engine detects if object dependencies are met
• Variables for conventions and environment differences
• Enforce the change-control process

License Reporting

• Enabled and concurrent license reporting
• Support for custom license definitions
• Business-unit-level reporting
• Intra-day reports, two minutes behind real-time events
• Customizable report templates

You can export InProd Changesets to a file and commit them into version-control systems. Puppet and Ansible modules interface with the InProd REST API, allowing them to enforce the state of the operating system, binary packages, and Genesys configuration. This is the missing ingredient for allowing Puppet and Ansible to build your contact center—from bare metal all the way up.

Configuration and Integration Capabilities

Differences between each lab and production environment can make the Genesys configuration inconsistent. The InProd Validation engine detects configuration errors between environments. InProd Variables handles naming conventions and the differences between environments, allowing a single changeset to flow between different environments without modification.

With Cyara integration built into the Changeset, the user experience is tested automatically at the time of deployment. The InProd post-deployment report also contains the Cyara test outcome and a link to the Cyara campaign reporting. Native integration between InProd and Cyara delivers a mature and complete DevOps toolkit for the contact center.

Disposable lab environments can be built within container technologies such as Docker, allowing the setup of individual labs per project or per engineer. Genesys changes can be committed into version control in the form of an InProd Changeset, which can include Cyara tests.

Using DevOps practices and the InProd Puppet or Ansible modules, you can promote Genesys and infrastructure changes between environments to keep all labs in sync.

Reaching Your DevOps End Goal

Many organizations have a vision of a DevOps strategy but aren’t sure how to get there. The effort to convert an existing environment into Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is large and unrealistic. A gradual approach to developing this capability is the best road to take. The use of InProd and Puppet lets you incrementally migrate to Contact Center IaC with each deployment, ultimately achieving a complete DevOps contact center environment.

InProd clients become ready for the inevitable migration of their contact center to the cloud but retain and build upon their current handcrafted Genesys environment. InProd provides cloud-based tools for on-premises Genesys customers, combining the best of both worlds.

By leveraging DevOps to manage a contact center, organizations can deliver with maximum speed, functionality, and innovation at lower risk. New functionality is developed when multiple teams run separate labs and unify with modern configuration management technology like InProd. For more information on Genesys AppFoundry partner InProd, visit our page in the AppFoundry Marketplace.