Introducing CloudBees Flow 8.0 with DevOps Insight!

We’re pleased to announce CloudBees Flow 8.0 is now generally available. This is a LTS (Long Term Support) release, introducing new features that transform the way our customers track and visualize Application Releases with DevOps Insight. This release includes all of the new capabilities from the feature releases 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 – enriching the supported Microservices & Container ecosystem and capabilities, providing centralized visibility with DevOps Insight Dashboards, and giving users an easy launch point with the customizable Self-Service Catalog. CloudBees Flow DevOps Insight, built on ElasticSearch and LogStash, is delivered as a tightly integrated stand-alone Business Intelligence (BI) server, which isolates reporting requests from pipeline orchestration to eliminate the threat of performance impact. By extending CloudBees Flow’s existing catalog of off-the-shelf plug-ins, DevOps Insight is able to pull key metrics from any tools being orchestrated as part of the end-to-end delivery process—from user story tracking and build automation to test automation and operations. A software development kit (SDK) allows teams to easily extend the solution to capture custom metrics from new tools.

See a short demo of CloudBees Flow 8.0

Read below for a more detailed list of highlights from the release:

• Release Command Center provides deeper top-down insight into your Release. Built on the reporting framework introduced in version 7.3, the Release Command Center provides a centralized view of all activities and processes related to your release.  New integrations pull key metrics from the tools used across the end-to-end process, from work item tracking and build automation to test and operations tools.  These metrics are combined with the CloudBees Flow Release to provide full visibility across your entire process, creating one place to go to visualize your entire release.
• Customizable Dashboards to view metrics that matter to you. With CloudBees Flow 8.0 you can now easily modify or create custom dashboards and widgets to visualize the data that is important for your organization.
• Improve your Mean Time to Recovery with automated and manual Retry. CloudBees Flow now provides the ability to retry a process or pipeline task from the point of failure.
• Customizable Self Service Catalog to empower your users. 8.0 exposes your DevOps automation to users with just a few clicks. New UI menus for creating and modifying catalogs and items in the Self Service Catalog simplify bringing your own automation into the catalog, so your users can get started quickly.
• New Pipeline and Release Options for improved authoring and flexibility.
  • Pipeline tasks can now directly call a command block, making it easy to incorporate custom scripts and actions right into your pipeline.
  • The new ‘Always Run’ option indicates that a pipeline task will be invoked even if there is a failure earlier in the pipeline, guaranteeing that cleanup or other tasks will always be run.
  • Rolling deployment options are now available in the release definition on the deployer tasks, so different phases of the rolling deployment can be run separately with checks in between, ensuring successful and safe deployment.
• Provision Container Clusters in your environment. This provides flexibility in cluster management, ensuring safe and efficient deployments with the ability to spin up clusters before deployment, separating that complex and intensive process from the actual micro-service deployment.
• New Plugins and Plugin Versions
  • New integrations to drive the Release Command Center DevOps insights Dashboard, with Jenkins, JIRA, ServiceNow and HP ALM.
  • Enhancements to the plugins for Subversion, TFS and Git.

To learn more about the features in this release, you can view the release announcement  and release notes . If you want to see how it works in your own environment, you can also download our community edition and use it for FREE on up to 10 hosts.