Software delivery tool provider CloudBees used the DevOps World | Jenkins World conference happening in Mid-August to announce a preview program for its upcoming software delivery management (SDM) platform.
The product is meant to facilitate collaboration between all kinds of teams, from market research to product programmers through to customer support, for better business outcomes. It could also expand the company’s reach beyond CI/CD solutions into other aspects of the software development lifecycle, which is a direction quite a few seem to run into these days.
CloudBees’ way of SDM is down to connecting processes and workflows. This comes with the introduction of data capturing throughout the development process, which promises better transparency and is needed for automation.
“CloudBees solution for SDM” as it is currently called, isn’t however meant to replace any of the company’s products, which would be a surprise given the years of work that went into them. Instead, they are planned to be integrated as modules, as CloudBees’ VP of marketing Shawn Ahmed explains in a blog post.
Letting customers sign up for the preview phase at this stage should let them “shape the solution” to meet their needs. Which is pretty much what those customers should aim for with SDM, according to Ahmed: creating software that “meets customer desires”.
A look at the SDM product page gives a bit of an insight into how the platform will develop in the next couple of months. While the preview program grants early access to a module for value stream management, a dashboard for data and development activity related to a product, and information on feature delivery, an efficiency dashboard and feature rollout management are planned to be the next features to land.
To make the most of DevOps World, CloudBees also took the chance to highlight the latest releases of their products Accelerator and Flow. Both came into the company through the acquisition of Electric Cloud in April 2019.
CloudBees Flow 9.1 (formerly ElectricFlow) is the first release under the new product name, bringing single sign-on with SAML, an enhanced Swagger playground, and new input parameters for a couple of deploy objects to the automation tool. The complete list of changes can be found in the documentation.
CloudBees Accelerator (formerly ElectricAccelerator) meanwhile hit version 11.1. Starting with this release, “perpetual licenses are no longer transferable to succeeding product versions” of the Cluster Manager, which means that you’ll have to purchase a new license if you want to upgrade to a new feature release. Patch releases within the same series are ok though.
Other than that the Accelerator was fitted with support for Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and Amazon EC2 on Linux platforms, automatic scaling of the number of agents in an Agent AMI, and a hard timeout option for eMake jobs amongst other things.