New in CloudBees Flow 7.3: Self-Service Catalog, Release and Deploy Dashboards, Deployment Package, and More Goodies!

Today, we are excited to announce the release of CloudBees Flow 7.3! This new version simplifies the promotion and usage of approved automation across teams, provides a new programmatic way for Developers to onboard applications, and also enables increased visibility into deployments and releases across any DevOps toolchain. To help Development and Operations teams who are looking to automate and coordinate software deployment and release across environments and tools, CloudBees Flow now includes:

• A new Self-Service Catalog with out-of-box templates to accelerate adoption, and facilitate object re-use by downstream teams
• An easy way for Developers to define applications and environment dependencies as code to ensure consistent, predictable downstream results
• New Release and Deploy Dashboards to enhance visibility into across the entire software delivery lifecycle

CloudBees CEO, Steve Brodie, on simplifying CD for busy Operations teams: “A few years ago, the ‘Consumerization of IT’ boosted job satisfaction and organizational productivity by inviting employees to ‘Bring Your Own’ Devices into the workplace. Today, CloudBees Flow enables the ‘Consumerization of CD', by allowing organizations and teams to ‘Bring Your Own’ processes, patterns, practices, and technology into a secure and well managed DevOps toolchain. Our aim is to make it easy for both Dev and Ops practitioners to ship software in a way that ‘works for them. ’”

Let's Dive In to some of the new features in this release:

New Self-Service catalog empowers end users to get started quickly

The new Self-Service Catalog allows you to expose your DevOps automation intuitively to your end users. This Self-Service Catalog leverages new, out-of-the-box best practice content (many new master component definitions, pipeline template, environment templates etc) to help you get started quickly with common tasks. You can easily add new service catalog items to make it easy for your end users to start getting value from your DevOps initiatives faster. End users can select from a catalog of templates, provide some immediate input parameters, and quickly get started with a new application model, processes, environments, pipeline or even a procedure or workflow. This self-service, centralized and scalable solution gives Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams a way to empower developers with the tools they need to move fast, while maintaining consistency, governance and compliance. This allows organizations to balance team ownership and flexibility with standardization and control to achieve increased manageability, system-level visibility and lower operational costs. A new self-service catalog brings an intuitive, consumer-like experience to DevOps.

‘Deployment Package’ to easily onboard applications from CI and other processes

DevOps is all about eliminating silos. CloudBees Flow is the industry’s only DevOps Release Automation solution to span the entire Continuous Delivery process - from code check-in to production release - with a single, unified platform. It provides the entire organization a central point of governance, collaboration and visibility to eliminate the gaps that can introduce friction and errors in the end-to-end process. The unified platform allows users to interact with and manage all DevOps processes and platform features in a way that works best for them – either as code, or via the product’s GUI. This enables teams to “treat their pipelines like a product,” to continuously improve application delivery and decrease the cost and risk of deployments. In addition to application onboarding options like GUI and DSL, CloudBees Flow now allows Developers to automate the generation of application, environment and pipeline models directly from common CI tools. Using a simple JSON manifest file, developers can “shift-left” application definition as part of the Build stage. This ensures consistency of the deployment package when used by downstream teams. Deployment Packages add yet another option to create applications in addition to the UI, API and DSL. When a deployment package is imported, application models will be created and even deployed automatically, ensuring predictability and eliminating the chance for a failed deployment downstream.

Deployment Package Manager allows easy importing of JSON application definitions.

Dashboards for Centralized Visibility

In addition to faster onboarding and improved self-service, new CloudBees Flow Release and Deploy Dashboards provide users with detailed reporting about the health of their commit, deployment and release pipelines. This secure, role-based and in-depth view can be filtered by time, project or other characteristics to give teams the fast feedback they need to spot trends and visualize application deployment and release lead times, successes/failures, frequency, throughput and duration.

New Release and Deploy dashboards provide insights into past and current pipeline and deployment performance.

Environment to Environment inventory comparison to enhance drift detection

With the new inventory comparison feature, teams can easily ensure fidelity of environments and identify environment drift with new views that compare environments.  During compliance audits or when troubleshooting an issue, it allows teams to visually compare the applications deployed on each environment, and drill down in the details to ensure there is no discrepancy.

Environment inventory and drift detection makes it easy for Ops to see what is where – and avoid problems.

Bulletproof deployments with Application Dependency Management

With the new application dependency management feature, you can now model and manage dependencies of your applications, with specific applications and versions they are dependent on to confirm that all dependencies are enforced during a deployment.  This avoids errors by preventing a deployment from proceeding if the dependencies are not met.

Advanced dependency management feature provides bullet-proof deployments.

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CloudBees Flow Community Edition is a full featured DevOps Release Automation solution that you can download and use, FOR FREE.