CloudBees Build Acceleration™ 11.3 is now available

Summary

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the CloudBees Build Acceleration 11.3 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 Accelerator, or even ElectricAccelerator, is now called CloudBees Build Acceleration. It is still the recognized leader in Build Acceleration. The only thing that’s changed is the name - and all the new features listed below.

This LTS Release of CloudBees Build Acceleration includes all of the features released in the preview releases from January to July 2020, plus more.  This release includes new features and improvements throughout the product, including performance improvements for the latest Android & Yocto projects,  expanded Jobcache support, security and Scalability improvements along with improved support for cloud bursting on Google Cloud.

Acceleration & Support for latest Android Open Source (AOSP) & Yocto projects

Out-of-the-box support for accelerating AOSP v11 is introduced. Support for emulating Ninja v1.9.0 which is a prerequisite for AOSP v11 and for modern CMake support is introduced. This enables CloudBees Build Acceleration to support the latest version and older versions of AOSP concurrently. This release also introduces out-of-the-box support for newer versions of the Yocto project, expanding support from version 2.0 (“jethro”) all the way to v3.1 (“dunfell”) while delivering improved performance out-of-the-box through the accelerated building of Yocto modules such as glibc. 

Expanded Jobcache support for build avoidance

Jobcache support is added for caching of .oS shared object files produced by the GCC compiler.

CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight for MacOS is now available 

CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight, the reporting and build visualization tool, is now updated to v5.7 and now includes Insight for the Mac on operating systems starting with Catalina.

Cluster Manager improvements for improved scalability of large, busy clusters 

The processing needed for reassigning agents from one build to another is reduced, improving the responsiveness of agent requests and reducing the frequency of spurious build timeouts on clusters with thousands of agents and hundreds of concurrent builds.

Improved GCP support with IAM support, support for preemptible instances & VPC options 

IAM role support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is introduced for secure credential management in production environments. Cloud bursting on GCP can now use preemptible compute engine instances for optimizing cloud expenses taking advantage of CloudBees Build Acceleration’s resilience to agent failures. Finally, GCP cloud bursting configuration options are introduced for connecting to VPC networks.

Improved Security for emake to CM and agents to CM communication 

CloudBees Build Acceleration will now use TLS communication between eMake and the Cluster Manager and the agents and the Cluster Manager by default for secure communication between all its components. 

Improved GNU make compatibility 

Support for GNU make 4.x  is improved with the addition of support for the $(file …​) function. In addition, support for GNU make 3.81 and 3.82 is improved with the addition of support for the  -include directive.

Usability Improvements including the introduction of Moxie

Several usability improvements are introduced in this release. These include the introduction of moxie, a tool to test basic cluster setup and demonstrate acceleration features. Moxie works by generating a synthetic build-like workload, including makefiles, compilers, linkers and other tools typically found in a software build. eMake usability is improved by warning users if it discovers an output target which is not contained within any of the eMake root set of directories. New report is introduced for the real time visualization of agent allocation. Improvements to the Builds Details and Agent Details pages are introduced. 

Download instructions

Download Cloudbees Build Acceleration 11.3 from the CloudBees Sharefile site:

• Sign in using your personalized account to the CloudBees Sharefile site at https://cloudbees.sharefile.com.
• Navigate to /products/accelerator/release_11.3/11.3.0.11855 or click 11.3.0.101855.
• For Insight, navigate to /products/insight/release_5.7/5.7.0.12119 or click 5.7.0.12119

Installers are located in the directory corresponding to the operating system (for example, windows). Release notes and product documentation are available online at CloudBees Build Acceleration Documentation.

Supported configurations

See the CloudBees Build Acceleration Supported Platforms for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.

Upgrade 

CloudBees recommends that all customers upgrade their Accelerator components to version 11.3. This includes the Cluster Manager, cluster nodes (agent machines), and all local eMake build machines. See the CloudBees Build Acceleration 11.3 Upgrade Guide for complete upgrade instructions.

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.