Announcing CloudBees Flow 7.2: Push-Button Deployments to All Container Platforms!

Here at CloudBees we are constantly listening to the market and our customers, and consistently delivering innovative releases that keep us ahead of the competition. Today, we are excited to announce the latest version of CloudBees Flow 7.2 ! This release is focused on improving speed, efficiency and flexibility across all aspects of the product – from adoption to running a release. It also enables users with more distribution options – including a simple Docker container download – to get teams started more quickly and help them achieve success with the product immediately.

“Containers and Microservices can enable unparalleled developer productivity by enabling teams to independently and securely develop, test and deploy value quickly to customers. We are all looking for ways to take advantage of Containers and Microservices, even for legacy applications.”

- Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of “The Phoenix Project” and “The DevOps Handbook.”

As application architectures evolve, organizations are left with a mixture of monolithic and microservices-based applications. To help manage that complexity more easily, we’ve enhanced our support for deploying both legacy + microservices applications, with native support for the most popular Container technologies. CloudBees Flow 7.2 includes built-in, push-button deployment forDocker, Kubernetes, Amazon Container Services (ECS), Google Container Engine (GKE), Microsoft Azure Container Service, OpenShift Container Platform, and Cloud Foundary container-based PaaS. AWS Lambda is also supported for Serverless-type application releases. This broad support enables organizations to stay agile and adopt the latest technology as part of their existing software delivery life cycle, while minimizing risk and allowing for shared visibility and orchestration.

In addition to making it easier than ever to get started, the latest version of CloudBees Flow boasts additional, advanced features to help teams optimize complex CI/CD processes at scale. New drag-and-drop capabilities allow teams to easily parallelize and re-prioritize pipeline tasks on the fly, in order to optimize cycle times. Policy-based approval gates that are data-driven allow teams to increase velocity without sacrificing compliance. This allows enterprises to enable continuous deployment safely, while automatically blocking any application updates that do not meet minimum requirements (such as acceptable performance or adequate code coverage).

Making parallel tasks easily visible in pipelines simplifies complex workflow creation and reordering. It’s an enhancement that is all about handling the complexity involved in optimizing pipeline execution at scale. We found that deployment pipelines can often contain complex scenarios and require management of dependencies, while still needing to run as efficiently as possible. While we’ve always supported parallelism of processes and pipelines, the new support for parallel tasks in 7.2 brings simplicity into the modeling and makesvisualization easy . We also bring additional visibility into the running processes to provide a better view of progress. Not only can tasks be grouped to run in parallel, approvals that require manual intervention can also be parallelized so you can accelerate all those manual tasks, as well.

Often times, a release includes multiple applications that need to be coordinated and managed – including any dependencies or manual steps that need to occur at each stage between individual application deployments. In 7.2 we provide even more control and flexibility in how you define your releases, enabling you to group applications in the release, run them sequentially or in parallel, and manage dependencies within those groups. This differentiates us from any other solution in that we allow fine-grained control over the order in which deployments occur within a stage, and re-usability ensures you don’t have to redefine the pipeline every time you start a new release – no matter what applications are included in the release bill of materials.

In 7.2, we’ve also introduced the notion of automated gates. This allows teams to define policies to control the promotion of a new version through the pipeline. Now, you can evaluate conditions captured internally, or evaluate based on data from external tools. This ensures compliance without requiring manual intervention.

In line with our theme of saving time and increasing efficiency, we’re introducing new ways to get CloudBees Flow up and running quickly and easily in your environment. The Community Edition is a full-featured CloudBees Flow server available for free . Now, we provide the Community Edition also as a Docker container , so you can get up and running in minutes with a simple “Docker run” command. This is in addition to the VirtualBox appliance that we already had, and will soon expand the Community Edition to AWS and Microsoft Azure. That way, you can use the product immediately with the technology of your choice.

“By delivering CloudBees Flow in a simple Docker container, we make it easier than ever for teams to jump-start their DevOps initiatives and orchestrate all the disparate tools in their existing CI/CD process. By supporting the entire ecosystem so you can deploy to any target within the rapidly growing container ecosystem, we help teams eliminate the ‘rocket science’ aspects of Microservices and Container deployments, future-proof for technology evolution, and accelerate time-to-value.” - Steve Brodie, CEO of CloudBees

Watch CloudBees Flow Product Manager, Avantika Mathur walk through some of the features and capabilities, as well as a short demo, showing how to get started using our new Docker-based distribution.

Learn more about CloudBees Flow anddownload the free Community Edition for free to start automating your deployments and streamlining your releases today!