CloudBees Flow® v2020.04 PR is now available

Summary

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the CloudBees Flow  2020.04 Preview Release (PR).  Please see our announcement about our Flow Release Strategy Update and our plan to accelerate the delivery of new content through Preview Releases. 

In this new release, we have made numerous enhancements to capabilities across product, with a focus on integrating across CI and CD .

Improved traceability, auditability and efficiency with persistence of CI build data in Flow pipelines. 

In the 2020.04 release, pipelines have a new dedicated space to view CloudBees CI build data.  When a build in Jenkins triggers a Release or Pipeline in Flow, the data is automatically pushed to Flow and visible in this new UI.  CI data collected includes: build outcome, log data, commits, test results and build artifacts.  

Persisting this data in Flow means all information from the CI/CD process is managed and available in one place, for ease of traceability and auditability, without switching between different interfaces,

Feature Flags at Enterprise Scale with new CD Integration

With the April preview release we introduce a new plugin with CloudBees Feature Flags (Rollout), empowering release managers to automate feature flags in their release processes. This new integration allows controlling the release of a feature post deployment and enables Canary deployments and A/B testing using feature flags. 

Manage Automation as Code

We continue to improve the experience of managing automation as code with the DSL.  A new self service catalog item for importing DSL code from Git makes it even easier to manage and version DSL code in your Git repositories.  With a simple click, DSL updates can be automatically checked out and imported to your Flow environment.

Plugins

We continuously develop and improve plugins used across DevOps processes:

• New updates to the CloudBees Flow plugin for Jenkis supporting the new enhanced integrations across CI and CD:
• Build data is now automatically pushed to Flow when triggering a release or pipeline.  This data is persisted in Flow and viewed from the pipeline run.
• A new action to associate a Jenkins build with a Flow pipeline or release.  This creates a relationship between the build and Flow, and the CI build data is persisted and available from the Flow pipeline.
• EC-SonarQube: New support for HTTP Proxy authentication
• Additional plugins are now enabled to use our new Plugin Dependency management capability, eliminating dependency on the Flow Artifact Repository: EC-Kubernetes, EC-Docker, EC-Dynatrace and EC-OpenShift.

Additional Improvements

• It is now easy to install custom libraries and packages on Flow agents deployed in Kubernetes, leveraging the customScript options in Helm 3.0.
• Security updates with support for Java 11 and upgraded versions Apache, PHP and SSL.

Download Instructions

Download Cloudbees Flow 20.04.00 PR from the CloudBees Sharefile site.

• Login using your personalized account to the CloudBees Sharefile at https://cloudbees.sharefile.com 
• Navigate to: /products/flow/preview_release/2020.04.00/2020.4.0.141849 or click here: 2020.4.0.141849
• Server and agent installers are located in the directory corresponding to the operating system (for example, windows)
• 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.

Install

Upgrades to CloudBees Flow 2020.04 PR are not supported.  Please install the release in a test environment to try these new capabilities and provide your feedback.  For complete install instructions, please see the Install section of the documentation.

Support

Contact Customer Support with questions related to this release by going to the CloudBees technical support site at https://support.cloudbees.com and submitting a support request.  Improvement requests can be filed at https://www.cloudbees.com/feedback .