Summary
This release brings substantial new functionality to improve software development team productivity and shorten time to value. Among these new features are a redesigned resources page, centralized agent installs and updates, an enhanced security model for agents, a new built-in license to increase installation flexibility, as well as many more improvements.
Electric Cloud recommends all customers upgrade both their Commander Server and Agents to version 4.2. Release highlights are included below. See the Release Notes for a summary of product improvements and known issues.
Release Highlights
ElectricCommander 4.2 new features include:
- Resources page redesigned - The redesigned Resources web page now provides complete Resource Management capabilities in one place. To better see your resources, two views are provided—Table and Grid. With the click of your mouse, you can see the Resource Details Panel, New Resource panel, modify a resource, or perform bulk operations across all resources you select.
- Install or Upgrade Remote Agents - Available from the Resources web page, this feature provides a popup dialog to facilitate installation of new host machines or to upgrade your existing hosts. Install and upgrade are both bulk operations—you can supply numerous host names to install, or select any number of resources from the Resources table view to upgrade. This feature is currently available for non-Windows agents only. Check the release notes on suggested best practices for using this feature.
- Trusted connections - Agents can now be either trusted or standard:
- Trusted - the Commander server verifies the agent’s identity using SSL certificate verification. With two-way certificate exchange, this provides an even higher level of security.
- Standard - the Commander server does not verify agent identity. This is the standard method Commander used prior to v4.2. Communication is still encrypted over an SSL connection. Standard is the default with trusted being optional.
- Zones and Gateways - Two new Commander objects:
- Zones - A zone is a way to partition a collection of agents to secure them from use by other groups. A default zone is created during Commander installation. The server implicitly belongs to the default zone, which means all agents in this zone can communicate with the server directly (without the use of a gateway).
- Gateways - To communicate with a resource, workspace, or artifact repository server in another zone, a “gateway” must be created. A gateway object contains two resource (agent) machines, each configured to communicate with the other. One gateway resource resides in the source zone and the other in the target zone
- API commands - 17 new API commands were added
- External Job/JobStep - These APIs are useful particularly if you have a job scheduler outside of Commander and would like to represent jobs from that scheduler within Commander. For example, an LSF grid system.
- Dynamic job step creation - Enables users to add new job steps to a running job. Using dynamic jobs is a lighter weight mechanism than using dynamic procedures.
- Procedure step precondition - Procedure steps have a new property, called precondition. A precondition is similar to the run condition, but differs in that the Commander scheduler continues to evaluate the condition. If the precondition results false, the step remains in the pending state. Any other value is interpreted as true and allows the step to proceed to the runnable state. Only after the step enters the running state is it assigned to a resource.
- JSON transport - In ElectricCommander 4.2, ec-perl and ectool now support JSON transport. JSON has numerous advantages including a smaller payload, enhanced readability, and faster processing speed.
- Upgraded JRE version - ElectricCommander now uses JRE 1.7
- Standard license - A standard license is automatically included with the Commander installation. Customers can now easily install Commander for development-level purposes in authoring procedures, workflows, and so on. The standard license limits job execution to a maximum of 2 concurrent steps. Your enterprise license must be used on your production server.
Download Instructions
Download ElectricCommander 4.2 from the Electric Cloud FTP site and the documentation from the Technical Support site.
- Log in to the Electric Cloud FTP site at http://ftp.electric-cloud.com/ftp or ftp://ftp.electric-cloud.com
- Navigate to the cmdr-4.2 directory
- Installers are located in the sub-directory corresponding to the desired operating system (for example, windows)
- IDE plug-in installers are located in the integrations directory
- Release notes and product documentation are available online:
https://electriccloud.zendesk.com/entries/22559552-electriccommander-documentation
Supported Configurations
See the “System Requirements and Supported Platforms” section in the ElectricCommander Installation Guide for a complete list of supported platforms and configurations.
Supported Upgrade Paths
Commander 4.2 supports upgrades from version 3.10.x and higher. See the “Upgrading ElectricCommander” chapter in the ElectricCommander Installation Guide for complete upgrade instructions. If you plan to upgrade from a version prior to 3.10.x, contact Customer Support for assistance.
Support
Contact Customer Support with questions related to this release at support@electric-cloud.com.
Feedback
Contact Jim McMahon, Product Manager, with feedback on this or any ElectricCommander release at 408-419-4378 or jmcmahon@electric-cloud.com.
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