CloudBees Advances Continuous Delivery

At the DevOps World | Jenkins World 2019 conference, CloudBees released an update to the continuous delivery (CD) platform it gained via its acquisition of Electric Cloud, signaling the company’s commitment to investing in a platform that’s employed widely in the enterprise.

CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said the rechristened CloudBees Flow builds on the application release orchestration (ARO) platform to further automate the last mile of a DevOps process.

Version 9.1 of CloudBees Flow provides a path to increased visibility into how a release is progressing, including the ability to view the inventory being deployed to a given environment and deeper insights into all the sub-pipelines that make up an overall release.

The latest release also provides more granular control over release pipeline execution, customizable dashboards within the platform’s Release Command Center and data archiving capabilities that make it easier to comply with regulatory mandates.

Labourey said that while companies that have developed commercial software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications tend to have very mature DevOps processes, most enterprise IT organizations are still defining the best DevOps practices they want to implement across their organization end to end. CloudBees Flow provides a continuous delivery framework for automating the deployment of applications at enterprise scale that complements the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform, he said.

Labourey noted the goal is to eventually unify continuous delivery processes across multiple platforms, including the ARO platform provided by Electric Flow, the Jenkins CI/CD platform and the Jenkins X and Spinnaker platforms that are optimized for building and deploying microservices-based applications on top of Kubernetes. As part of that effort, earlier this year CloudBees became a founding member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an arm of The Linux Foundation dedicated to foster best continuous delivery practices.

Most organizations that have adopted CI/CD platforms have seen varying degrees of success in taking advantage of continuous integration to accelerate the development of their applications. Continuous delivery, however, has proven to be a much bigger challenge. Organizations tend to struggle with everything from making sure they have the appropriate infrastructure resources available to support a new release of an application to debugging application code before and after it’s deployed in a production environment.

It may be a while before most enterprise organizations truly master DevOps processes end to end. However, given how dependent on software most organizations are, increased reliance on DevOps processes has become a prerequisite for any form of digital business transformation. As the volume of software being developed increases, the rate at which updates to applications are being made also increases substantially. Most organizations are not going to be able to keep pace with that rate of change by relying on legacy software development and deployment processes.

In many more cases now, however, the challenge organizations are wrestling with is not so much whether to transition to DevOps, but rather determining which DevOps processes to standardize on to satisfy the elevated expectations of business leaders anxious to provide customers with that next great application experience.

— Mike Vizard