Promotion to production

[SeanAdams]

In a controlled environment, there is a need to control promotion of assets to prod with basic controls to ensure that someone has tested, signed off, that it meets certain quality standards (like "no warnings", "no Run Commands", "all reports must have company logo on top left" etc).

However, at the moment there doesn't appear to be a promotion process in Alteryx to control this flow, so assets are copied across by an admin.   This is very manual and error prone (many times we've had the wrong assets copied), and it also means that this process is controlled in a workflow outside of Alteryx (e.g. A JIRA queue or similar).

Could we request that Alteryx look into a production promotion process, which allows the admin team to perform any required checks (including automated checks), and then pushes this into prod stamped with the designer's Kerberos rather than the sys admin?

Joint idea with @avinashbonu @DamianA  @BenBu

[MattB]

Hi @SeanAdams, thanks for sharing the idea. We have received this request from a few other customers also. We completely agree that it would be great to have some built-in form of a controlled, promotion process either within Alteryx Server or across Alteryx Servers defined for certain environments. I have already added your feedback to our system and will be sure we consider shifting priorities during our next roadmap planning exercise.  We are also interested to see how many customers Star this post or further re-iterate a need for this feature. Please continue to share your feedback!

[SeanAdams]

Thanks Matt!

BTW - @AustinO and I were talking about this during Inspire and we probably got a bit over-excited and came up with a whole pile of super-cool (read: super-geeky) ideas that would be useful, and also talked about how this may relate to the future journey for Promote.

Some of the ideas we had:

- As we look at assets - we can build an alteryx process that performs certain quality checks before promoting like:

• Have you removed all the browse tools;
• have you turned off row limits and cache flags;
• do you have tools without specific labels;
• do you have join tools that are excluding a whole mess of fields that should instead be filtered before this using a filter tool
• Do you have any "missing" fields in tools that need to be cleaned up
• Do you have any branches of your workflow that do not end in an output tool (if so, trim these out)

- From there; Promote has a great way of pushing items from one stage to the next

- From there: tie this into connect

• If this is an updated version of an existing item, then notify anyone who has subscribed for update notifications on this asset in Connect
• Change the status of this item in Connect to "published"

There's a whole pile of useful and fun stuff we can do now that we have the 3 parts of Alteryx in one stable (Server/Gallery; Connect; Promote) - gonna be incredible once we integrate these into one platform!

[SrucBI]

Is there an update on this? It has been in Under Review status for nearly 2 years. As an organisation which values release management, I am struggling to adopt Alteryx across the board because it essentially violates all kinds of Release Governance requirements.

One aspect I am finding particularly challenging is the fact that it is quite difficult to dynamically set things like file names, and if you are calling a macro, you have to essentially hardcode the macro name/location. What I would want to be able to do is dynamically choose which macro I am running based on whether I am running in dev, uat or production - if I am updating a macro and want to release it, there is no easy way to say to dev components "use this test macro" and production components "use this production macro" - If I push something from dev to production, I essentially have to go in and manually change the macro component before making it live.

[SeanAdams]

@SrucBI  - I believe that the release / SDLC process is being revisited as the server environment is updated but not sure of the timelines.   

It's well worth setting up time with your account rep and asking them to bring the product team so that you can talk through this and ensure that this is built into the core of the server.   We have done a few sessions on this with our account rep to highlight the need and importance of this kind of capability.

[SrucBI]

I wanted to add an update to my original query, specifically around how to ensure that I am using the "right" version of dependencies such as other macros, incoming parameter files etc. As a newbie, I was extremely pleased to discover how to do this and wanted to share in case it helps anyone else.

Scenario:

Workflow X  ( C:/Gitfolder/X/X.yxmd )  has dependencies on

Macro Y ( C:/Gitfolder/X/Y.yxmc ) 

Shared Macro Z ( C:/Gitfolder/Shared/Z.yxmc )

Script Q ( C:/Gitfolder/Scripts/Q.bat )

File F ( H:/File Path/F.csv )

When setting up this workflow, Designer will default to hardcode all these paths.

Promotion Dev - > Prod:

I develop Workflow X in my local git directory, then at the point I want to move to production, I have to in theory go in and change the paths to the Scripts and Macros to point at the "production" location for these dependencies.  For F, I run the risk that the user under which the Production workflow runs, does not have the same mapped drive name, and the file won't be found.

Workflow Dependency Solution:

I go into Options > Advanced Options > Workflow Dependencies

For each of the above components, I can alter the default, hard coded paths, to relative and UNC paths. Assuming that my production locations also have a folder structure of X, Scripts, Shared on the same level, I can make the following changes:

Macro Y -> relative path  ->  ./

Macro Z  -> relative path ->  ../Shared

Script Q  -> relative path -> ../Scripts

File F -> UNC path -> \\fileshare/FIle Path/F.csv

[SeanAdams]

Hey @SrucBI 

As far as I know there's no easy to do this right now - there are a few ideas posted on this exact topic that may be worth adding your support to:

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Designer-Ideas/Defect-Deep-dependancy-management/idi-p/1397...

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Ideas/Designer-link-to-Macros-on-gallery/idi-p/85736

Additionally - if you pop a question into the designer discussion group, you may find that someone has found a workaround to this in the community?

[siddharthjhanji]

Hey Guys,

Is there any update on this?

[KylieF]

Hi All!

After careful review from our product team, we've decided the best status for this idea at this point in time would be Revisit. While our product team is interested in including this idea into the product, we are unable to include it in a near future release. We'll update this idea again however once we have the ability to better speak on when or if this feature can be included in the Designer product road map.

[SeanAdams]

Thank you for the update @KylieF  - this is somewhat unfortunate given that the control of movement of canvasses from dev to UAT to Prod (or just from Dev to Prod) is required under law under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which imposes requirements for management of changes to software and configuration in a production environment; and segregation of responsibility for these migrations.    

Given that this control of migration through the lifecycle is a legal requirement in the US; and a frequent point of audit - is there anything we can do as a community to elevate the priority of this item?   

[jarrod]

While I haven't had the rigorous requirements that @SeanAdams has encountered, I feel this would go a long way in general organization and best practices for all of my workflows as well.