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Application Lifecycle Management: Best Practices to CI/CD with Zuora Billing and Payment Processes

By Lana Lee posted 11-16-2023 10:25

  

At our November 7th Table Talk, we were joined by product managers Aparna Unnithan, Prachi Bhatia, and Karn Singh who gave an overview of Application Lifecycle Management and best practices to CI/CD. Part of our deploy-faster initiative is investing in a full suite of tools to help your IT team to improve testing and deployment agility:

  • Application Lifecycle Management
  • Data Management
  • Tenant Management
  • Support Management


Application Lifecycle Management  

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Application Lifecycle Management allows you to manage your users, data, and environments to ensure testing agility and ease of deployments.Part of our deploy-faster initiative is investing in a full suite of tools to help your IT team to improve testing and deployment agility.

Zuora Developer SBX allows the developers to take a snapshot of the configurations from production. It allows frequent refreshes enabling developers to test the latest modifications in a clean environment. 

Central Sandbox takes a snapshot of both production configurations and transactional data to speed up your UAT testing. It is an ideal environment for performance and load testing. In FY23 the users will be enabled to customize data scrubbing.

Data Migration is a fundamental component for testing,deploying, and releasing faster. Learn more: Data migration in Zuora Billing.

This suite of capabilities ensures you are testing with agility and ease. Learn more from the video and presentation below.


Zuora Testing Environments  

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Capabilities

API Sandbox

Developer Sandbox

Central Sandbox

Production Snapshot - Transactional Data

Not Included

Not Included 

Included

Production Snapshot - Configuration Data

Not Included

Included

Included

Allowable Snapshot Refreshes

Not Included

2X per month

1X per month

Automated Data Scrubbing 

Not Included

Included

Included

Self-service Tooling

Not Included

Included

Included

Performance guidelines (Data Store)

5K records

250K records

Similar to Production

Designed for

Previewing new Capabilities

Integration development & testing

UAT & performance testing


[Watch] Demo - Self-Service UI

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Self-Service UI Zuora


New Capability: Configuration Templates 

Replicate, reuse product catalog Metadata configurations

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Why is this important?

  • Configuration Templates are dynamically generated to meet the ever changing business needs to accommodate growth and additional Zuora environments
  • Reconfiguring assets can be time-consuming,product catalog templates ensure data consistency for faster go-lives
  • Product Catalog Templates can be applied to or created specific to an entity 

What is new, and what does it mean for customers? 

  • Ensure consistency across all environments, enhance reliability by reducing errors
  • Product Catalog configuration Templates facilitate consistent, repeatable processes like price changes, creating or modifying product, rate plan.
  • APIs to facilitate external processes for continuous integration, development, and testing. 

When will it be available? 

  • GAH2CY24
Configuration Templates


New Capability: Data Loader 

Faster & More Accurate Bulk Data Actions with Data Loader 
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Why is this important?

  • Spreadsheets are still a common way to store and move data, and right now it’s hard for customers to use them to load data. 
  • Data loaded often needs to be manually validated and cleansed to be useful

What is new, and what does it mean for customers? 

  • Unified experience for data export and import for Billing Customers (eventually replacing Dev Tools)
  • Data cleanup and validation during input to mitigate failed lines and post import effort
  • Templates to facilitate consistent, repeatable processes like import price changes, accounts, invoices, and more.
  • APIs to facilitate external processes for continuous integration, development, and testing. 
  • Compliance at the core via user, date/time, and actions audit

When will it be available? 

  • GA

For more information, check out the Data Loader KC article.


DevOps Agility 

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DevOps agility is becoming a competitive edge for businesses worldwide. From the CA Technologies Annual DevOps Survey, “Organizations embracing agile devops practices are seeing a 60% higher rate of revenue and profit growth.” But most companies still can’t keep up with the software testing and delivery demands of their business:

  • 85% of companies face barriers in their DevOps implementation
  • Only 18% of businesses have reached this level of agile DevOps maturity
  • Most organizations spend 30% of their time on updates and upgrades


Intended Direction - e2e CI/CD Process Leveraging Your Tooling 

Source Control Managed Provision and Teardown Process 

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CI/CD Process
  • Metadata changes driven via JSON blobs within config templates
  • Metadata stored centrally in source code repo
  • Crud operations to serve deployments (build, load, compare config changes (CRUD Operations)
  • Automated config management via prod refreshes (dev / central sbx)


Data Management Coverage Roadmap 

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Objects (GA now)

Rest of H2 2023 (Sep  2023 - Dec 2023)

Data Loader

Bulk Import and Delete actions supported on the below objects:

  • Accounting Code

  • Accounting Period

  • Accounts and Contacts

  • Invoice

  • Invoice Item

  • Offers

  • Payment Schedule

  • Payments

  • Price Book Items

  • Units of Measure

  • Usage

Support Import and Delete actions on  the below objects:

  • Credit Memo (Oct ‘23)

  • Debit Memo (Oct ‘23)

  • Amendments (Oct ‘23)

  • Custom Objects (Oct ‘23)

  • Product (Oct ‘23)

  • Product Rate Plan (Oct ‘23)

  • Subscription (Nov,23)

  • Product Rate Plan Charge (Nov ‘23)

  • Product Rate Plan Charge Tier (Nov ‘23)

  • Orders (Dec ‘23)

Deployment Manager

Compare and deploy metadata from source to target tenant of the below objects:

  • Accounting Periods and Accounting Codes

  • Billing Documents

  • Custom Fields

  • Custom Objects

  • Hosted Payment Pages

  • Notifications

  • Product Catalog

  • Settings - Billing, Payments, Finance

  • Taxation

  • Workflows

  • Compare and deploy Reporting objects metadata from source to target tenant (Oct ‘23)

  • Deploy metadata to source tenant for Product Catalog via Config Templates (Nov ‘23)

  • Deploy Product Catalog with Natural Keys (Product Number) (Nov,23)

  • Deploy Notifications Callout -Metadata and Email templates (Dec,23)


Overall CI/CD E2E Roadmap 

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H2, CY23

  • Developer Sandbox ‘test’ data snapshot inclusion (i.e. 50 accounts)
  • Metadata Deploy API for streamlined Deployment Manager

H1,CY24

  • CSBX/Revenue Sandbox linkage and pair refresh
  • Git Repository direct links (Data Loader and Deployment Manager)
  • Solution ‘deploys’ (discovery, tagging, naming, versioning and bundling) 


Video and Presentation

Application Lifecycle Management: Best Practices to CI/CD with Zuora Billing and Payment Processes

Application Lifecycle Management: Best Practices to CI/CD with Zuora Billing and Payment Processes


Stay Updated on Feature Releases and Product Maintenance

Application Management is a race from “figment” to “feature” in record time with tools to increase DevOps velocity without compromising best practices. To be notified about when these features are released, sign up for our Release and Maintenance notifications by following these steps.

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