CloudBees CD™ v10.0 LTS is now available

Original Creation Date: 2020-06-30 06:10:00 UTC

Summary

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the CloudBees CD  10.0 LTS.  With this release, CloudBees is introducing new, self-describing product names across our entire product line that make them easier for anyone in our target market to find, and to understand intuitively what they do. What you’ve known previously as CloudBees Flow, or even ElectricFlow, is now called CloudBees CD. It is still the recognized leader in Continuous Delivery Release Orchestration and Application Release Orchestration. The only thing that’s changed is the name - and all the new features listed below.

This LTS Release of CloudBees CD includes all of the features released in the preview releases from January to May 2020, plus more.   This release includes new features and improvements throughout the product, introducing a more seamless experience across CI and CD processes  with new integrations,  ease of administration with CloudBees CD installation on Kubernetes, and improved management of automation as code in DSL.

Please see our announcement about our Flow Release Strategy Update and our plan to accelerate the delivery of new content through Preview Releases. 

A seamless CI/CD experience with improved visibility, auditability and efficiency 

In CloudBees CD 10.0 we have a focus creating a seamless experience across CloudBees CI (CloudBees Core) and Cloudbeees CD.  New integrations and native product capabilities  provide a single view of the end to end release process - from code commit to production - and accelerate pipeline creation, eliminating manual errors.

• CloudBees CD pipelines have a new dedicated space to view CloudBees CI build data.  When a CloudBees CI or Jenkins Job is integrated with a CloudBees CD Release or Pipeline, the data is automatically stored in CloudBees CD and visible in this new UI.  CI data collected includes: build outcome, log data, commit data, test results and build artifacts.  

Persisting this data in CloudBees CD 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.

• CloudBees CI integrations are now first class citizens within CloudBees CD.   Connection details are defined as server level configurations.  Calls to CI jobs are a first level pipeline task in CloudBees CD, where job data and parameters from CI are automatically populated, eliminating the need to know and type out names and configuration requirements. 
• Build metrics for any integrated Jenkins job are automatically pushed to DevOps Insight dashboards, for quick visibility into build trends in the CI dashboard, and Release status in the Release Command Center.
• A new post build action has been added to the CloudBees CD plugin for Jenkins, enabling any CI Job to be associated with a CloudBees CD release or pipeline and its data pushed to CloudBees CD for central traceability.

Simplify server administration: Deploy CloudBees CD to Kubernetes 

In version 9.2 we introduced a new way to install CloudBees CD, in containers on Kubernetes.  Using Helm charts to configure and deploy all components of the CloudBees CD  architecture in Kubernetes, greatly simplifying configuration, installation and management of CloudBees CD clusters.

With the 10.0 LTS, this capability is now ready for production use with new enhancements including:

• Added support for Helm 3. 
• Support deployment to RedHat OpenShift.  
• Installation of custom libraries and packages on CloudBees CD agents deployed in Kubernetes, leveraging the customScript option in CloudBees CD agent Helm chart.
• Improved documentation for different configuration options.

See the installation guide for instructions to get started with CloudBees CD on Kubernetes.

Develop and manage Automation as Code in DSL with ease

We continue to improve the experience of managing automation as code with the DSL.

• Developing DSL code is now easier than ever! A new DSL IDE is now part of the product.  Develop and execute DSL code directly from the DSL IDE with ease, using features like syntax highlighting, type-ahead, inline help, auto-formatting, import/export, example code and common editor functions.
• 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 CloudBees CD environment.
• New options to improve managing DSL code, like suppressing null values, are available when exporting DSL directly through the UI

Feature Flags at Enterprise Scale with new CD Integration

Introducing a new plugin with CloudBees Feature Flags (Rollout), empowering release managers to automate feature flags in their release processes. This new integration allows granular control of the release at the  feature level and enables canary deployments and A/B testing using feature flags. 

Plugins

We made numerous enhancements to how we integrate with CloudBees CI and Jenkins with improvements to our plugins, supporting the features above for a seamless CI/CD experience across both products.

We continuously develop and improve plugins used across DevOps processes, including:

• EC-Helm: A new plugin for integrating with Helm to orchestrate Kubernetes deployments.  Supporting Helm 2.0 and 3.0.
• EC-GCP-ComputeEngine: A new plugin that integrates with Google Cloud Platform to provision and manage Compute Engine Instances.
• EC-SonarQube: New support for HTTP Proxy authentication
• EC-ServiceNow: Added ability to pass ServiceNow display values in addition to ServiceNow system identifiers

The CloudBees CD plugin development framework (FlowPDF) empowers users to extend CloudBees CD in a few simple steps, and now supports developing plugins in Groovy, and boilerplate code generation simplifying creation of plugins.  

We improved how we manage plugins depending on binaries with a new feature called Plugin Dependency Management.  Any binary dependencies are now seamlessly delivered to the agent resource, rather than requiring the CloudBees CD Artifact Repository to be installed.  We enabled numerous plugins with this new capability.

Additional Updates

• A new Resources page to view and manage resources in CloudBees CD.  This new page includes a resources view, with advanced search and editing options.  Resource management is even easier with a new menu for installing and upgrading agents with CloudBees CD’s centralized agent management (CAM) capability.
• Release Portfolio enhancements
• Pipelines that were triggered by another Pipeline or Release can now be attached to a Release.
• Release portfolio data can now be updated regularly with a new server setting
• Further strengthening our support for enterprise workloads and performance at scale, we have made numerous performance improvements across the product.
• Improved security defaults and updates to Java and the web server.

• The CloudBees CloudBees CD agent has been updated to support 64-bit MacOS Catalina.

Download Instructions

Download Cloudbees CD LTS from the CloudBees Sharefile site.

• Login using your personalized account to the CloudBees Sharefile at https://cloudbees.sharefile.com 
• Navigate to: /products/CloudBees_CD/release_10.0/10.0.142654  or click here: 10.0.142654
• 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 CD Documentation 
• See Documentation for installing with Kubernetes

Supported Configurations

See the Supported Platforms for CD section for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.

Upgrade

Upgrades to CloudBees CD 10.0 LTS are supported from CloudBees Flow 5.x, 6.x, 7.x  8.x and 9.x versions.  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 after using the Feedback button.