“That’s okay, my builds are fast enough.” - said no one ever.
Competitive pressures in all industries means our customers are always looking to squeeze more time out of the development cycles and are constantly scrutinizing their build and test stages. Time is money after all. For instance, for one of our financial services customers, waiting 15 minutes for a build to complete can mean millions of dollars in lost trades.
To help our customers keep up, with CloudBees Accelerator 11.2 we are introducing several new capabilities that dramatically shrink development cycles, improve software quality, and release more frequently. We’ve expanded its support as well as performance improvements for Jobcache, Android builds and embedded Linux/Yocto Project builds.
Read on for further details.
Accelerator is now available on the Google Marketplace
Accelerator can now be deployed on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace. GCP Marketplace lets you start up software packages easily without having to manually configure the software, virtual machine instances, storage, or network settings.
Performance Improvements
Jobcache has been extended to support caching of library creation steps on Linux. Jobcache now caches .so files from GNU ld or ld-compatible archivers and .a and .la files from jobs using GNU ar or ar-compatible archivers.
Amazon EC2 Spot instance support for cloud bursting
Customers using Amazon EC2 cloud bursting can now spin up spot instances on a resource basis to enable significant cost savings when their build runs out of static resources. They can also prefer spot instances over on-demand instances.
Extended Kubernetes support for cloud bursting
Customers who are moving to Kubernetes can now spin up Kubernetes resources on demand when their build runs out of static resources, leveraging Accelerator’s built-in fault tolerance. It is no longer required for eMake or the build initiator to be in the Kubernetes pod.
Android build improvements
Out of the box support for Android 10 (“Q”) builds is added. For Android first-time (“learning”) builds, eMake “kick starts” these builds by determining if you lack a history file and then providing a “kickstart” history file, which helps to reduce the build duration.
Improved support for Embedded Linux builds
The latest versions of the embedded Linux Yocto Project builds are now supported. This includes all Yocto versions from 2.0 (“Jethro”) to 3.0 (”Zeus”).
Usability Improvements
Users can now watch the progress of their builds. The percentage complete, number of agents running jobs, other statistics and error messages are now shown on the console. Output is controlled by the --emake-show-progress option.
Security Improvements
The Linux ClusterManager has been upgraded to use Apache 2.4.41, PHP 7.4.1 and OpenSSL 1.1.1d.
Additional platform support
CloudBees Accelerator now supports the following platforms:
RHEL 8.0 (64-bit)
RHEL 7.7 (64-bit)
RHEL 7.6 (64-bit)
Download instructions
Download CloudBees Accelerator 11.2 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_11.2/11.2.0.93434 or click 11.2.0.93434 .
Installers are located in the directory corresponding to the operating system (for example, windows). Release notes and product documentation are available online at CloudBees Accelerator Documentation .
Supported configurations
See the “Supported Platforms and System Requirements” chapter in the CloudBees Accelerator Installation and Configuration Guide for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.
Upgrade
CloudBees recommends that all customers upgrade their Accelerator components to version 11.2. This includes the Cluster Manager, cluster nodes (agent machines), and all local eMake build machines. See the “Upgrading Accelerator” chapter in the CloudBees Accelerator 11.2 Installation and Configuration Guide for complete upgrade instructions.
Support
Contact Customer Support with questions related to this release at accel-support@cloudbees.com.