CloudBees Build Acceleration™ 12.0 is now available

Summary

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the CloudBees Build Acceleration 12.0 LTS.  

This LTS Release of CloudBees Build Acceleration includes all of the features released in the preview releases from August to November 2020, plus more.  This release includes new features and improvements throughout the product, including performance analysis and visualization improvements in the Cluster Manager User Interface which makes it easy to pinpoint bottlenecks on a per build basis along with providing actionable recommendations for improving performance. This LTS release also significantly improves the performance of Android incremental builds for improving developer productivity when using CloudBees Build Acceleration. In addition, this LTS release adds support for the latest Android and Yocto projects, expanded Jobcache support, security improvements along with support for the latest Linux platforms.

Cluster Manager improvements for performance analysis, visualization along with actionable recommendations 

This release includes performance analysis and visualization improvements in the Cluster Manager User Interface derived from CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight which makes it easy for system administrators and developers to pinpoint bottlenecks on a per build basis using the redesigned and expanded Build Details tab.  A timeline visualization of the build is now available along with the composition of different types of job in the build combined with estimated time savings from using Jobcache. The newly introduced recommendations sub-tab provides a prioritized list of actionable recommendations for improving build performance based on the analysis of the build and identification of well known anti-patterns.

Build Speed Improvements & Support for latest Android Open Source (AOSP) & Yocto projects

Several performance improvements are introduced to speed up full and incremental AOSP builds to improve developer productivity. These improvements include Jobcache caching improvements, expansion of Jobcache to newer programming languages and improvements to the Ninja parser built into CloudBees Build Acceleration. 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 version 3.2 (“gatesgarth”) while delivering improved performance out-of-the-box through the accelerated building of Yocto modules that are built with the ninja parser. 

Expanded Jobcache support for build avoidance

Jobcache support is added for caching of Kotlin object files produced by the Kotlin compiler.

Build Signatures and Totality Metric

A new metric called the Totality Metric is introduced and available through the Cluster Manager UI which shows the extent to which the components of a given build had to be rebuilt, from no-touch builds (totality 0%) to full builds (100%).  This is accomplished with the use of build signatures, a hash generated per built component which determines whether the output has changed.

New out-of-the-box reports available with CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight 

New reports introduced in CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight include the Recommendations report, Jobcache summary report and a diagnostic report. In addition, a command line version of Insight is introduced enabling its seamless inclusion in headless Continuous Integration contexts. 

Improved Security for agents to CM communication

New agent security settings are introduced for the agents to use TLS when communicating with the Cluster Manager. These settings are preserved during upgrades to enable seamless upgrades.  

Support for the latest Linux distros and Windows operating system

Support for the latest versions of CentOS, Debian, RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu versions  are introduced along with support for Windows Server 2019.

Download instructions

Download Cloudbees Build Acceleration 12.0 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_12.0/12.0.0.104615 or click 12.0.0.104615

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 12.0. This includes the Cluster Manager, cluster nodes (agent machines), and all local eMake build machines. See the CloudBees Build Acceleration 12.0 Upgrade Guide for complete upgrade instructions.

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