Summary

CloudBees is pleased  to announce the 10.3 release of the CloudBees Software Delivery Automation platform. In this release, we continue the effort to bring CloudBees CI, CloudBees CD/RO and CloudBees Feature Management into a single platform through: 

• Improvements for unified authentication, 
• Introduction of CloudBees CI license usage reporting
• Improvements to both CloudBees CI and CloudBees CD/RO audit reports
• CloudBees Analytics for CloudBees Feature Management. 

In addition, platform enhancements such as improved database performance, simplified multi-zone deployment in Kubernetes, and plugin configuration and management are part of this long term supported release.

Improvements to unified authentication across Software Delivery Automation

Single sign-on (SSO) for Software Delivery Automation provides unified authentication, allowing users to sign in once for access to both CloudBees CI and CloudBees CD/RO capabilities. From the enterprise perspective, it means customers can configure SSO once on the CloudBees Software Delivery Automation server for the entire platform. For CloudBees CI  users, the CloudBees Software Delivery Automation (Software Delivery Automation) platform serves as the identity provider. This release introduces support for the OpenID Connect based identity providers. CloudBees CI delegates to the OpenID Connect identity provider configured on Software Delivery Automation to authenticate CloudBees CI users.

In addition, improvements to SSO SAMLv2.0 support in CloudBees Software Delivery Automation CD/RO are introduced. When configuring SSO with SAML v2.0, the requirement has been removed to set up a separate directory provider like Active Directory for authorization.  A new option allows users to automatically be registered upon authentication by SSO, eliminating additional configuration and use of separate methods for authentication and authorization.

Enhanced analytics and integration with CloudBees Feature Management

The  CloudBees Analytics Release Command Center dashboard (RCC) has been enhanced to include analytics sourced from CloudBees Feature Management including the status of feature flags configured for each release, enabling release managers to implement and monitor the state of progressive delivery in different environments. 

Enhanced management and security for plugin configurations at scale

CloudBees is changing how plugin configurations are created and stored in CloudBees Software Delivery Automation, making them easy to manage and secure.  They are now first class objects created within projects for ease of management, secured through access controls, and can be managed as code through APIs, DSL, and ectool. The Plugin Management user interface has also been updated to simplify creation and management of plugins and their configurations. Plugin Management now includes an in-product version of the plugin catalog that can be customized in each customer environment.

Introducing CloudBees CI license usage UI

A new user interface provides read-only visibility into the list of active user licenses across all CloudBees CI controllers in the customer’s environment to ensure CloudBees CI usage is compliant with license entitlements. These reports provide an accurate list of unique CloudBees CI users across all their controllers during a time period. 

Improvements to CloudBees CI build visualization, audit reports and analytic dashboards

CloudBees CI users can now visualize and search CloudBees CI build logs from within the Software Delivery Automation User Interface. A new deployments audit report is newly introduced for each pipeline and release run. Audit reports and analytic dashboards can now be exported as PDF.

System performance improvements

With continued focus on enterprise grade scalability and performance, CloudBees has made significant improvements to system performance when using MySQL and MSSQL databases.

Simplified installation of Software Delivery Automation in a multi-zone deployment

In multi-zone Kubernetes deployments where agents are running outside the Kubernetes cluster, gateway agents provide secure communication across zones.  With enhancements to the Software Delivery Automation Helm chart, gateway agents are installed and configured as part of the installation process, simplifying install and configuration steps. 

Google Cloud support for artifact repository component

Users can now specify a GCP storage bucket along with AWS S3 bucket or a NFS shared drive as the backing store for the artifact repository component. 

Support for customer built containers

Starting with this release, CloudBees CD/RO component binaries and associated Dockerfiles are available for security minded customers to enable them to build their own container images. 

CloudBees CD/RO plugin enhancements

• The following plugins have been updated to support plugin configurations as first class objects: EC-Git,  EC-Jenkins, EC-JIRA, EC-Nexus,  EC-Rest, EC-SonarQube,  and EC-Github. 
• EC-Docker plugin v2.0 has been updated to remove support for the legacy microservices model. This plugin, along with EC-Helm, can be used to support microservices deployments. 
• EC-FeatureFlags v1.2.0 now supports  integration with CloudBees Feature Management and enables CloudBees Analytics release command center dashboard support for showing state of Feature Flags per release.

Deprecated CloudBees Software Delivery Automation CD/RO Plugins

The plugins listed below are deprecated and are no longer supported with CloudBees Software Delivery Automation CD/RO. 

• EC-Kubernetes and EC-OpenShift plugins have been removed. Use EC-Helm instead of these plugins.
• ECSCM, ECSCM-File, ECSCM-Git, ECSCM-Property: use EC-Git instead of these plugins for the Git use case.
• EC-CIManager

Support

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

Download Instructions

• Download Software Delivery Automation at CloudBees Downloads
• Release notes and product documentation are available online: CloudBees CD/RO Documentation & CloudBees Analytics Documentation

Supported Configurations

See supported platforms and system requirements for CloudBees CD/RO for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.

Upgrade

Upgrades to v10.3 LTS are supported from CloudBees CD  9.x, 10.0.x, 10.1.x, and 10.2.x versions.  For complete install instructions, please see the Installation section of the documentation.

Support

Contact 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.