CloudBees Jenkins Platform 15.11 (November 2015) General Availability

This past summer CloudBees introduced the CloudBees Jenkins Platform , bundling CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise with CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center. This combination of CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise's best-in-class CI/CD capabilities and CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center's centralized management, configuration, and reporting enables customers to easily scale their CI/CD initiatives across their entire organization and craft end-to-end pipelines with Workflow. With that, I am happy to announce the arrival of latest update for the CloudBees Jenkins Platform, Version 15.11 (November 2015) built on Jenkins LTS 1.625.2.

This release of CloudBees Jenkins Platform delivers:

• More powerful Continuous Delivery capabilities focusing on Jenkins Workflow

• Enhanced operational features for managing Jenkins at scale

Continuous Delivery with Jenkins Workflow

CloudBees introduced the Workflow plugin to enable the creation of more complex build pipelines in Jenkins and improve Jenkins support for long running jobs. Since it's introduction we have been working hard to continuously improve these capabilities and ensure compatibility.

• Pipeline as Code - Pipeline as Code is a collection of new features introduced in this release that represent a major step forward in enabling the creation of fully automated, integrated pipelines using Jenkins. Using these features it is possible to automatically generate and run a Workflow job for every new repository, branch and pull-request created in your SCM without having to visit Jenkins.

  • Jenkinsfile - The Jenkinsfile is a self-contained Workflow script that resides in the root directory of your repository. This allows you to edit your Workflow scripts like any other piece of code in your application. The code itself now not only defines the application but also how the application should be built, tested and deployed. As the application changes from one version to the next the delivery pipeline changes with it.

  • Multibranch Workflow Jobs - It is now possible to create Multibranch Workflow jobs for any Git, Mercurial, or SVN server using the respective SCM plugin. This includes GitHub, BitBucket, Gitlab, Gerrit, and all other SCM providers. When a new Multibranch Workflow job is configured to work with a specific repository it will query all branches (based on the Includes/Excludes directives) for the presence of a Jenkinsfile. CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise will automatically generate a new sub-folder and job for every branch containing a Jenkinsfile and run that job. When anything changes in the branch, including the Jenkinsfile, the job will be re-run based on the current content of the Jenkinsfile. Using CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, all Pull Requests in GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and BitBucket Cloud are treated as a branch and new jobs are created accordingly.

  • Organization Folders - Most SCMs are structured based on teams, organizations, projects, etc. that contain and manage users, roles and repositories. These organization units are typically somewhat autonomous and concerned with their own applications. Many Jenkins administrators use Jenkins Folders to compartmentalize the CI/CD jobs for these organizational units. With this release of CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise it is now possible to automate the process of creating and organizing all CI/CD Workflow jobs into the appropriate folder structure. Creating a new Organization Folder item in CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise - associated with a GitHub Organization (or user), GitHub Enterprise Organization, or BitBucket Cloud Team - will automatically generate a Folder hierarchy for every repository in that organization that contains a Jenkinsfile. It also automatically inspects all branches within those repositories and will generate the appropriate folder hierarchy for all branches or pull-requests that contain a Jenkinsfile.

• Workflow Syntax Highlighting - Pipelines built with Workflow in Jenkins can be extremely powerful but also extremely complex. Until now, writing a new Workflow script within the bare Jenkins input screen provided no real time feedback regarding the structure or correctness of the script. With this release the Jenkins Workflow editor now has full syntax highlighting to help guide the creation of new scripts.

• Workflow Compatibility - Workflow's ability to create more durable jobs that are able to survive a client controller restart is based on a newer architecture that is not compatible with some existing Jenkins plugins. CloudBees has spent many cycles over the past few months updating plugins to make them compatible with Workflow. The list of plugins linked here is continuously updated as we make changes. If there are plugins that you want incorporate in a workflow pipeline please let us know.

CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center - @Scale CI/CD

CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center connects all of your CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise controllers and enables you to not only manage and report across all of those controllers but share jobs, tools, and configurations among those controllers. This release enhances the ability to work across controllers and simplify day-to-day operations.

• Move/Copy/Promote - Using the CloudBees Folders plugin it is possible to move and copy jobs on a single Jenkins controller. With the latest release of CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center it is now possible to Move, Copy, or Promote jobs within a controller or across controllers.

  • The Move button will move the current item with all its build history to the new location. The original item will be removed on confirmation of the item having been successfully received at the destination.

  • The Copy button will copy the current item with all its build history to the new location. The original item with all its build history will also be retained at its original location.

  • The Promote button will copy the configuration without any build history of the item to the destination. If an item of the same name already exists at the destination, that item’s configuration will be replaced by the source item’s configuration. The build history of the source item and any pre-existing destination item will remain unchanged by the promotion.

• Custom shared agent properties - CloudBees Jenkins Operations Center administrators can now store custom properties such as platform specific environment variables at the node level to be shared by all client controllers.

• Push Tool Installers to Client controllers - Customers today have to manage installers for various tools on each client controller, resulting in significant operational overhead. CloudBees JenkinsOperations Centers administrators can now centrally manage their client controllers’ tool installers by pushing the tool installer locations from the CloudBeesJenkins Operations Center controller to all client controllers in one shot.​

• CloudBees Jenkins Analytics - ElasticSearch has been upgraded to version 1.7 and Kibana is now on version 4 to enable even more robust and feature-rich dashboards and analytics across all of your Jenkins controllers. ​​

Patrick Wolf
Product Manager
CloudBees