Enterprise DevOps tool provider CloudBees Inc. announced the launch of a new versions of its Flow and Accelerator platforms today at the company’s annual DevOps World 2019 conference.

CloudBees Flow version 9.1 is aimed at driving developer team efficiency by automating and orchestrating software release lifecycle, pipelines and deployment using analytics and insights to track and improve results. The new features are designed to smooth and customize the orchestration process further by providing more personalized dashboards, new data archiving and more real-time visibility into a release’s path to production.

This new release builds on the strength of the former ElectricFlow orchestration platform, acquired by CloudBees during the recent purchase of Electric Cloud Inc. The company describes the additional features and enhancements as part of its vision to “reduce release anxiety.”

New features in Flow 9.1 include fully customizable dashboards that allow users to display their own personalized data, highlight a given release pipeline and better reveal their own release process called Release Command Centers. Users will also be able to archive older data to the system for regulatory and compliance issues.

In addition to better dashboards, users will get full visibility into how a release is progressing, including a full view of the inventory that is being deployed to any given environment. Better insights into the overall release and sub-pipelines will also be part of an intuitive interface that uses legends and color-coded views to understand the project’s release from a top down perspective.

Finally, the updates include greater flexibility and full control for release pipeline execution with the ability to run tasks out of order, pre-run tasks in future stages (for improved control of run order), prevent conflicts and errors beforehand and ensure one deployment is run at a time.

CloudBees Accelerator version 11.1 does what the name implies and assists DevOps team get products to market faster by allowing teams to “burst” workloads to all three major cloud providers — Amazon Web Services Inc., Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. — as well as shorten build and test times for devices running the upcoming Android Q operating system from hours to minutes. 

With Accelerator, DevOps teams can dramatically accelerate quality assurance and test cycles by spreading the load over a large number of inexpensive servers, the company said.

Previous versions of Accelerator enabled developers to burst workloads from a data center or private cloud onto an AWS cloud platform. Now the platform also supports Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, allowing for on-demand shifting between cloud platforms to help increase efficiency and reduce the chances of vendor lock-in.

The new release will also support Android Q. Android device makers are under a huge time and cost pressure to build for the upcoming release of Q, which is expected to happen in the third quarter of 2019. Using Accelerator, DevOps teams can shorten build times from hours to minutes, which will give them a significant leg up when it comes to releasing to market faster.

In addition, the updated Accelerator will include support for secure communication using secure sockets layer and transport security layer cryptographic channels to defend against data interception. This enables security-sensitive businesses such as financial and medical can best insure their builds are not hacked or leaked.

Image: CloudBees