Summary
Electric Cloud is pleased to announce the general availability of the ElectricFlow 8.0 LTS. This release is of the “Long Term Support” type. For more information about types of releases, please go to ElectricFlow Release Strategy.
ElectricFlow 8.0 LTS transforms the way you track and visualize your Releases with DevOps Insights. This LTS 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. Additionally ElectricFlow 8.0 also includes new features and functionality to drive your DevOps release pipelines.
Some of the highlights are:
Release Command Center: The One Stop For All Release data
With many tools involved in the progress of a Release, the need to get insight into the health of a Release is getting more important than ever. Teams want to better understand: how many user stories are planned, how many of them are dev complete, how many are tested, what is the success rate of each of those etc. While much of this data exists, it is spread across different tools and requires manual effort to stitch it all together.
ElectricFlow 8.0 introduces the new Release Command Center for 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 ElectricFlow Release to provide full visibility across your entire process, creating one place to go to visualize your entire release.
View Metrics that Matter to you with Easy to Customize Dashboards
ElectricFlow already included out-of-the box DevOps Insight dashboards showing key best practice metrics for your Deployments and Releases. With ElectricFlow 8.0 you can now easily modify or create custom dashboards and widgets to visualize the data that is important for your organization. New menus and options in the UI make it simple to add and organize dashboards and create new widgets.
Recover from Issues Quickly with Retry
When there is a failure, rather than requiring a restart of the entire deployment or pipeline, ElectricFlow now provides the ability to retry a process or pipeline task from the point of failure. New retry options on application processes and pipeline tasks reduce runtimes and improve quality. Users can select retries to be triggered manually, after the failure has been resolved. The retry can also be automated to trigger a fixed number of times on an interval, for situations such as intermittent network failures anticipated to resolve on a subsequent retry.
Easily Customize the Self Service Catalog to Empower Your Users
The Self-Service Catalog helps you accelerate your DevOps adoption and promote DevOps best practices and consistent processes throughout the organization, with out-of-the-box best practice templates for common use cases, and the ability to create your own catalog items.
In 8.0, expose 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. The introduction of options for uploading artifacts, streamline the process even further. Additional best practice content is available with new out-of the-box catalog items to get you started quickly in ElectricFlow.
New Pipeline and Release Options for Improved Authoring and Flexibility
New options and controls in Pipeline and Release provide added flexibility and control:
- 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 Independently
You can now provision clusters in your container runtime platform independent of application deployments. 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.
Plugins
- 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.
Download Instructions
Download ElectricFlow 8.0 LTS from the Electric Cloud Sharefile site.
- Login using your personalized account to the Electric Cloud Sharefile at https://electric-cloud.sharefile.com
- Navigate to: /products/flow/release_8.0/8.0.0.120919 or click here: 8.0.0.120919
- Server and agent installers are located in the directory corresponding to the operating system (for example, windows)
- IDE plug-in installers are located in the /products/commander/integrations directory
- Release notes and product documentation are available online: ElectrircFlow Documentation
Supported Configurations
See the “System Requirements and Supported Platforms” section in the ElectricFlow Installation Guide for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.
Upgrade
Upgrades to ElectricFlow 8.0 LTS are supported from ElectricCommander 4.2.x, ElectricFlow 5.x, ElectricFlow 6.x, and ElectricFlow 7.x versions. Systems that are pre-4.2 must be upgraded to ElectricCommander 4.2.x before upgrading to ElectricFlow 8.0. For complete upgrade requirements and instructions, please see the ElectricFlow Installation Guide.
Support
Contact Customer Support with questions related to this release at support@electric-cloud.com.
Feedback
Contact the product management team at Electric Cloud for this or any ElectricFlow releases at productmanagement@electric-cloud.com
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