Announcing CloudBees Flow v8.3

Written by: Electric Bee
4 min read
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Updates provide enhanced Release Portfolio view, SmartMap Topology view, Microservices Discovery and Container Lift-and-Shift for legacy workloads

Building on previous product announcements that set the standard for planning and scheduling releases and DevOps Insight , we are pleased to raise the bar again with CloudBees Flow, version 8.3, available now.
This new version enhances our ground-breaking innovation in three key areas:

  • Managing complex enterprise releases with dependencies

  • Industry-first visibility into Kubernetes clusters

  • Accelerating container adoption

We’ll have more details and videos on these features shortly. In the meantime, take a look at what's inside:

Portfolio View: Hierarchical Release and Pipeline Management

Enterprise releases are complex, with many moving parts and dependencies. They are often comprised of other sub-Releases, and groups of applications, each with their own pipelines and timelines. Managing this complex hierarchy using Excel spreadsheets, or even using older release management tools which lack automation, can be a nightmare. With support for hierarchical releases and pipelines in CloudBees Flow, you can model, automate and visualize dependencies across releases.
In addition to dependency modeling, the Portfolio View for releases and pipelines provides top down visibility into the entire dependency hierarchy. At runtime, this view gives detailed insight into the status of each pipeline in the hierarchy, down to the stage level -- showing successes, failures, and waits for manual tasks or dependencies. This view provides the status of all related releases at a glance, with drill downs into dependencies, to easily understand progress and identify delays -- significantly simplifying the task of enterprise release management.

SmartMap Topology View for an unprecedented 3D view of container deployments

Container runtime environments can include numerous services deployed across clusters, with detailed interdependencies between them. It can be challenging to understand the complex mesh of clusters, namespaces, services, and nodes - and how they are related, especially as the numbers grow. It is also a challenge for DevOps and Development teams to know where their particular service is deployed, how well is it doing, or to access logs for troubleshooting, without talking with Kubernetes administrators.
The new SmartMap Topology view transforms the way you visualize and manage your container cluster environments. The interactive 3D visualization displays the interdependent services, clusters and pods deployed in Kubernetes, and the connections to the microservices and environment models in CloudBees Flow. With capabilities to interactively rotate and zoom in on focus areas, view live status of deployments, and drill down into details. SmartMap makes it easy to visualize, understand, and ‘touch’ your complex microservices topology. It also aids with troubleshooting and impact analysis.

Start modeling Microservices quickly with automated discovery and onboarding

You can now immediately leverage your existing investments in microservices to automate modeling in CloudBees Flow with new Self-Service catalog items for container discovery and onboarding.

  • Kubernetes Discovery: Simply provide the connection details of your existing clusters in Kubernetes, and CloudBees Flow will automatically discover the services and create ready-to-deploy Microservices models and Environments.

  • Automated Onboarding with Import: Enter your Kubernetes YAML files or Docker Compose files detailing your microservices definitions and dependencies to automatically create deployable Microservices models in CloudBees Flow.

With automated onboarding, you can quickly translate your existing assets into reusable components to natively manage and deploy Microservices in CloudBees Flow.

Lift and Shift traditional Java/.Net artifacts to containers

For organizations wanting to take advantage of the benefits of containers, without the effort required to decompose and re-write their traditional monolithic applications, CloudBees Flow 8.3 provides new Lift and Shift capabilities. The Lift and Shift function in CloudBees Flow picks up where your existing CI processes leave off. Lift and Shift will take your traditional build output using out-of-the-box templates to automatically build and publish Docker images that are ready to deploy to your container runtime, significantly accelerating your container adoption journey.

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