Announcing CloudBees Flow 8.2 - A Unified Platform to Plan, Schedule, and Track All Kinds of Releases

Written by: Electric Bee
4 min read

Waste is the enemy of quality and time to market. Eliminating waste, unnecessary work, and waiting time is a common theme in Lean Manufacturing, Agile Development, The Three Ways, and The Phoenix Project . EMS Strategies wrote about The Seven Wastes way back in 2003. Eliminating waste (what we call “Release Anxiety”) is also the main goal of DevOps: getting rid of errors from manual processes, waiting times, unexpected roadblocks, etc.

The 7 Wastes, illustrated. Source: http://leanmanufacturingtools.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/7-wastes.gif

In addition to the challenges of identifying waste itself, the problem gets exacerbated as applications and releases in most companies are in a state of flux – from Mainframe, to traditional java/.net to containers and everything in between - with varying release frequencies and cadence. CloudBees Flow 8.2 eliminates the release anxiety caused by this complex hybrid world with even more visibility and control of your pipeline. Now available, version 8.2 of CloudBees Flow changes the way you plan, schedule, and track releases. Now you can plan releases with precision, by milestones and dates, from a unified release and environment calendar. You can now more easily find bottlenecks and ways to optimize your pipeline. We’ve also made important improvements in managing microservices sprawl as well as making it easier to onboard new team members.

Here are few things we’ve heard from our customers:

“We’re spending too much time in release status meetings, sifting through spreadsheets and endless email threads.”

“We’d like to plan our releases with more precision, defining each milestone and expected delivery date.”

“We need to know where we’re spending our time with EACH task in each stage so we can really see how much is automated, how much is manual, and how much is idle time.”

“We’d like to visualize delivery timelines, environment availability and blackout periods together in a unified release and environment calendar.”

“We want a complete view of microservices deployments and their metrics to help us optimize performance.”

“Root cause analysis would be easier if we could drill down from the dashboard directly into the third-party tool.”


CloudBees Flow Delivers!

Here’s some of the new features of this release:

1.Plan, Schedule and Track Releases with Precision

Planned versus Actual Pipeline View

  • **** Plan your releases with precision, defining each milestone and expected delivery date. In addition to existing schedule information on the overall release, you can now create start and end dates on stages including at the task level for focused granularity on plans and schedules.

  • Track your progress with the planned vs actual view, a timeline that shows your progress and where you are on your milestones. See how you are doing relative to the plan, and easily isolate delays.

  • Deep insight into total time spent per stage, and time spent in automated vs manual activities, to quickly identify bottlenecks and opportunities for process optimization and automation.

  • A brand new Release Management experience with simplified release pipeline authoring and easier access to various management views.

2.Unified Release and Environment Calendar to Identify and Manage Conflicts

Unified calendar showing release and environment schedules and potential conflicts For organizations managing multiple releases across multiple teams and shared environments at the same time, it is critical to have centralized visibility to identify schedule and resource conflicts. The new Releases Calendar gives a top down perspective of all releases and environment reservations in one view. With this new Calendar view you can:

  • Track completed, in-progress and planned releases in one view

  • Visualize delivery timelines, environment availability and blackout periods together to zero in on conflicts

3.Visibility into Microservices Deployments, Immediately

Microservices dashboard showing deployment success rates, deployment outcomes over time, frequencies, and more. As microservices are now a foundational element to digital transformation strategies, it’s vitally important to have a complete view of where they are, how they are performing. CloudBees Flow DevOps Insight now includes a new dashboard which highlights key metrics specific to microservice deployments. The Microservice Deployments dashboard includes insight into microservice deployment throughput, success rates, cluster utilization and more.

4.Streamlined Navigation Across All Objects

Hierarchical menus illustrating the model, state, and more. CloudBees Flow 8.1 introduced a new hierarchy menu for simplifying navigation and authoring of applications. Now in 8.2 this focus continues with faster authoring for new and experienced users through new hierarchy menus in Environments, Pipelines and Releases. Following the same patterns as in applications, these new menus provide an easy to understand view of the model structure and where you are within it, highlight any missing pieces and streamline navigation across the objects.


CloudBees Flow Community Edition is the only Adaptive Release Automation solution with:

  • The versatility to start fast and adapt to your unique needs,

  • Has unprecedented insight and control over your releases, and,

  • Is the most reliable at any speed and scale.

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