At the ZeroTurnaround demo, I spoke with Krishnan Badrinarayanan, their Product Marketing Manager. ZeroTurnaround, the creator of JRebel and LiveRebel, describes itself on their site as a company “dedicated to changing the way the world develops, tests and runs Java applications."

“We just launched LiveRebel 2.5 today,” stated Badrinarayanan, “which enables companies to embrace the concept and practice of continuous delivery, which means having a pipeline that takes products right from the developers to an end-user, faster, more frequently -- all the while ensuring that it’s a quality product that does not break in production. So customers don’t feel the discontinuity that something has changed under them and that they can’t deal with the change. And all this happens while there is zero down time.”

He pointed out that Salesforce.com is not useable from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. on Saturday because they are engaged in maintenance. “With LiveRebel 2.5, you can unify the whole delivery chain without having any downtime at all,” he said. “There are many products that tell customers to take their tools and change how they work as an organization so that you they have to conform to the way the tool prescribes them to work as an application team. We take a more pragmatic approach. A lot of companies might use Jenkins or Bamboo to do continuous integration. We extend that. We say, take our product, take LiveRebel okay, and integrate it with Jenkins – you can do that quickly, so that, in half a day, you will be up and running. And let LiveRebel automate your deployment processes and all the automated tasks that go with it. Right from tests to the staging environment to production -- all with zero downtime and with no impact on users currently using the system.”

“So if you were to make the update right now and you had 100 users on your system, they would not even know this was happening. It would maintain their sessions and transfer them over to the new version, all in the background.”