ElectricFlow® v8.1 FR is now available from Electric Cloud

Original Creation Date: 2017-10-17 00:47:25 UTC

Summary

Electric Cloud is pleased to announce the general availability of the ElectricFlow 8.1 FR.  This release is of the “Feature Release” type. For more information about types of releases, please go to ElectricFlow Release Strategy. 

ElectricFlow 8.1 FR brings enhanced visibility into your data in DevOps Insights, improved support for microservices delivery, and simplified visualization and navigation of application models

Some of the highlights are:

Release Command Center: Drill Down for a Deeper View

In ElectricFlow 8.0, we introduced the Release Commander, a DevOps Insights dashboard providing a top-down view of all activities and processes related to your release.  Now in 8.1, we provide easy access to the data behind each metric in the Release Command Center by providing drill down capabilities. For example, clicking on the Stories metrics in the Planning phase will open a custom view of all of the JIRA stories in this release, and clicking on Successful Builds in the Build phase opens a view of Jenkins builds.  With 8.1 not only can you get a bird’s eye view of all the key metrics, you can quickly zero in on hotspots and bottlenecks in your releases to improve your time to market.

The Applications Hierarchy: Simplified Modeling and Navigation

In recent releases we have focused heavily on faster onboarding with capabilities like the Self-Service Catalog and tutorials so users can achieve value quickly. We extend that further in 8.1 with a new hierarchy menu in ElectricFlow to significantly simplify navigation. This menu allows you to easily see the application model structure and your position within it, as well as identify any steps that are still required to deploy your application.  This simplifies the experience for new users learning ElectricFlow’s model driven approach and helps them start creating applications quickly, while making the navigation of an application and its environments easier for all users.

Mainframe Support

Mainframes continue to be mission critical systems for businesses, and today’s composite applications are made up of a combination of distributed environments, mainframes, microservices etc.  ElectricFlow 8.1 brings DevOps Release Automation best practices to the Mainframe ecosystem. ElectricFlow can now enable orchestrating mainframe components alongside other application components and manage any dependencies between them.  As part of this support, we have introduced a suite of new plugins:

• z/OS Utilities
• IBM DB2 on Mainframe
• Compuware ISPW
• Compuware Topaz suite

Independently Deploy Microservices

Continuing to enhance features for deploying your microservices, in 8.1, users can create microservices that can be managed and deployed independently.   A service can now be defined independently of an application, directly mapped to it’s own cluster in an environment, and deployed on its own.  This new method of defining services enables autonomy in development and delivery of microservices which are shared across applications.

Enhanced Retry in Pipelines

Building on the retry feature introduced to pipelines in 8.0, we now support retry for groups of serial tasks that are run together.  This ensures that when retrying on an error at any point in the process, dependencies between the tasks will be honored, because all of the tasks in the group are retried as a unit.

Plugins

• Docker: A new plugin to enable microservices deployments to Native Docker and Docker Swarm
• Added support for new Kubernetes APIs and Service Type in the Kubernetes based plugins: EC-Kubernetes, EC-OpenShift, EC-AzureContainerService, and EC-GoogleContainerEngine

Download Instructions

Download ElectricFlow 8.1 FR from the Electric Cloud Sharefile site.

• Login using your personalized account to the Electric Cloud Sharefile at https://electric-cloud.sharefile.com
• Navigate to: /products/flow/release_8.1/8.1.0.123068 or click here:  8.1.0.123068
• 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: ElectrircFlow Documentation

Supported Configurations

See the “System Requirements and Supported Platforms” section in the ElectricFlow Installation Guide for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.

Upgrade

Upgrades to ElectricFlow 8.1 FR are supported from ElectricCommander 4.2.x, ElectricFlow 5.x, ElectricFlow 6.x, and ElectricFlow 7.x versions and ElectricFlow 8.0.0/8.0.1. Systems that are pre-4.2 must be upgraded to ElectricCommander 4.2.x before upgrading to ElectricFlow 8.x. For complete upgrade requirements and instructions, please see the ElectricFlow Installation Guide.

Support

Contact Customer Support with questions related to this release at support@electric-cloud.com. 

Feedback

Contact the product management team at Electric Cloud for this or any ElectricFlow releases at productmanagement@electric-cloud.com