Original Creation Date: 2019-06-25 00:26:27 UTC
Summary
ElectricFlow is now CloudBees Flow! CloudBees recently acquired Electric Cloud, and as part of CloudBees we are continuing to innovate and bring exciting new features and capabilities to the product under a new brand. See more about the acquisition here.
We are pleased to announce the general availability of the CloudBees Flow 9.1 FR. This release is of the “Feature Release” type. For more information about types of releases, please go to CloudBees Flow Release Strategy.
This release is focused on customer success with more options for users to customize and manage their release processes and enhancements to many existing capabilities.
Some of the highlights are:
Customize the Release Command Center to visualize your unique release
In 9.1 we introduce a dashboard editor making it easy to customize the Release Command Center dashboard to reflect your organization’s specific release process. The drag & drop, interactive UI makes it easy to change the dashboard layout, add or remove widgets, or even entire swim lanes.
With the new dashboard editor, the end-to-end high level view of the entire release process in the release command center can now be fully customized to show the release phases, metrics, and toolchain that are unique to your release. You can even create entirely new custom dashboards with the command center layout.
Enforce data retention and compliance policies with data archiving
Enterprises from regulated industries have strict guidelines around data retention for auditing and compliance purposes. These policies can include requirements to maintain data for certain periods of time and in controlled read-only storage.
Now with new data archiving support in CloudBees Flow, you can define complex data retention policies to automatically archive data to any archiving system through the extensible model, to ensure the organization meets compliance requirements. The data can also optionally be purged from Flow to maintain the database size.
Parameter dropdowns drive automation dynamically
In 9.0 we introduced data-driven parameters that can be populated and displayed dynamically. We continue to expand this work in 9.1. We have added new parameter dropdowns for Flow objects like applications, releases, pipelines and environments – making it even easier to define complex input parameters to drive your automation dynamically.
New Pipeline features for visibility, flexibility and control
We continue to enhance the pipeline authoring and runtime experience:
- New options to pre-run tasks in future stages give the flexibility to run certain tasks out of order to improve efficiency and control in the entire process.
- Prevent conflicts and errors by using new settings to mark application deployment processes to require exclusive access to an environment. Using these options, teams can ensure that only one deployment will run at a time, and avoid issues with concurrent runs on the same environment.
- More control in the pipeline process with new options to skip a manual task if it is not required.
- Reduce errors and conflicts that can be introduced with concurrent pipeline runs with new pipeline options to only allow one run at a time.
- Finer granularity in pipeline schedules allow you to meet your exact release schedules
Enhanced visibility into your releases
New improvements to release views give deeper visibility into your release.
- Path to Production: The path to production view provides quick visibility into how your release and environments are doing. Inventory details of each environment in the release show whether the release . New improvements to this view make it easy to identify discrepancies between environments and highlights activity outside of the release.
- Release & Pipeline Portfolio View: The interactive release portfolio view shows the entire hierarchy of an enterprise release with nested releases and dependencies. Improved visualizations in this view make it even easier to understand your complex hierarchy of releases.
Single Sign On with SAML for seamless access to CloudBees Flow
In 9.1 we extend single sign on (SSO) to support SAML authentication. Easily configure SSO with your identity provider, for access to Flow without requiring a separate login. With SSO, you can view dashboards seamlessly or approve pipeline gates with a single click from an email.
Plugin Development Framework: Empowering users to easily extend CloudBees Flow
Introducing the new Flow Plugin Development Framework. The framework provides a combination of tools, APIs and libraries which can be used to create a flow plugin in just a few simple steps. The entire set of capabilities of the framework are made available through a single command line tool (CLI) called flowpdk.
Using flowpdk and following the new framework, users can easily create custom extensions for CloudBees Flow to integrate with any tool or process.
Plugins
We continue to add new plugin integrations with tools used across DevOps processes, and improve existing integrations:
- New Plugins
- EC-AzureDevOps integrates with both Azure DevOps Services (previously known as VSTS) and Azure DevOps Server (previously known as TFS) to provide management of Work Items and Builds.
- EC-Twistlock integrates with Twistlock a container security solution to run Scans and create policy reports on Images.
- EC-Nexus integrates with SonaType Nexus Repository Manager to provide Artifact Retrieval and enables Nexus as one of the Maven Repositories available in the Flow Component Definition.
- EC-RemoteAccess provides the ability to execute one or more commands (including interactive commands) on Linux Remote Hosts.
- EC-Artifactory now supports publishing one or more artifacts to JFrog Artifactory
- Additional enhancements to EC-Jenkins, EC-Ansible, EC-ServiceNow and EC-BigIP
Download Instructions
Download Cloudbees Flow 9.1 FR from the CloudBees Sharefile site.
- Login using your personalized account to the CloudBees Sharefile at https://cloudbees.sharefile.com
- Navigate to: /products/flow/release_9.1/9.1.0.138283 or click here: 9.1.0.138283
- Server and agent installers are located in the directory corresponding to the operating system (for example, windows)
- IDE plug-in installers are located in the /products/commander/integrations directory
- Release notes and product documentation are available online: CloudBees Flow Documentation
Supported Configurations
See the “System Requirements and Supported Platforms” section in the CloudBees Flow Installation Guide for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.
Upgrade
Upgrades to CloudBees Flow 9.1 FR are supported from ElectricFlow 5.x, 6.x, 7.x 8.x and 9.0.x versions. For complete upgrade requirements and instructions, please see the CloudBees Flow Installation Guide
Support
Contact Customer Support with questions related to this release at support@electric-cloud.com.
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