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  • CloudBees Advances Continuous Delivery

    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

  • DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    You may have already seen the news today: CloudBees has acquired Electric Cloud in a move that marks a true market consolidation in the DevOps space. I had a chance to speak with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey to discuss the acquisition. We discuss the motivation for the deal, what the combined entity may look like going forward and more. The video of our conversation is at the bottom of this article.

    In my mind, this acquisition represents true consolidation of the DevOps tool vendors market. My reasons for this are as follows:

    1. Until now, many of the acquisitions in the DevOps space have been by large, established public companies such as CA, HP or IBM. Typically, these kinds of deals are not as much consolidation as they are large companies using M&A activity in place of R&D. CloudBees is not a large vendor—this isn’t R&D dressed in an acquisition.
    2. Electric Cloud is not your typical venture-backed startup that is looking for exit opportunities. The company has been around for many years. It has a large base of enterprise customers and an enterprise-tested product.
    3. With the recent changes in the DevOps vendor market involving CA (now Broadcom), HP(E) now Micro Focus and IBM preoccupied with Red Hat, there is a vacuum for enterprise leadership. The combination of these two vendors of scale is really a consolidation move.

    Best of luck going forward and congratulations to our friends at CloudBees and Electric Cloud. It will be interesting to see what repercussions this deal brings to the rest of the DevOps market.

    For more details on the acquisition, check out Mike Vizard’s article in devopsy.kinsta.cloud today. In the meantime, enjoy the video and conversation with Sacha. Also, let us know what you think about the acquisition—and other M&A activity in the DevOps space—in the comments section below.

    — Alan Shimel

  • CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud to Advance Continuous Delivery

    CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud to Advance Continuous Delivery

    CloudBees announced it has acquired Electric Cloud as part of an effort to extend the reach of its DevOps portfolio further into the realm of continuous delivery and application release automation (ARA).

    Announced at the CloudBees Days event in San Francisco, the deal follows CloudBees’ acquisition of Codeship, a provider of a cloud-based continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, last year.

    CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said both deals are part of an effort to start rolling up many of the smaller companies providing DevOps tools that have not been able to achieve the critical mass required to operate at scale. As organizations of all sizes realize how much they depend on software to differentiate their company from competitors, he said, they are looking for a single vendor that can address all their requirements end to end. At the time of the acquisition, which closed earlier this month, Electric Cloud had 110 employees.

    Labourey added the acquisition of Electric Cloud is also notable because it extends the reach of the CloudBees Jenkins and Jenkins X CI/CD platforms to the realm of application delivery for both legacy applications and emerging modern applications based on cloud-native microservices architectures.

    While application development teams have largely embraced continuous integration, getting IT organizations to successfully implement continuous delivery has proven more challenging. The next phase of DevOps, Labourey said, will need to focus on applying machine learning algorithms to automatically discover the environment in which an application is to be deployed. Armed with those insights, it should be much easier for organizations to continuously deploy and update applications across diverse IT environments, he noted.

    As DevOps continues to evolve, it’s apparent that legacy categories such as application release management are going to be subsumed into larger software development lifecycle frameworks based on best DevOps practices. The debate many organizations are currently engaged in is determining how much they need to change their IT culture before acquiring the tools and platforms required to successfully adopt DevOps. However, Labourery said this “chicken and egg” debate overlooks the importance of getting the tools to the teams that need to make the transition to DevOps occur. Otherwise, IT leaders will find themselves advocating for a theoretical cultural change without creating the opportunity for anyone to gain hands-on DevOps experience, he noted. In short, there’s no substitute for on-the-job DevOps training.

    A consolidation of DevOps vendors is underway. In some cases, those acquisitions will be driven by leaders in a category, such as CloudBees. In other cases, providers of software development tools commonly used in legacy application environments will need to extend their reach further into the realm of DevOps. IT leaders, going forward, will need to consider carefully just how and where they want to place their bets, at a time when DevOps teams tend to add and discard DevOps tools, often with little to no regard for any larger IT strategy.

    For more insight on the CloudBees/Electric Cloud acquisition, check out Alan Shimel’s video conversation with Sacha Labourey.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Electric Cloud Aims to Make DevOps More Accessible

    Electric Cloud Aims to Make DevOps More Accessible

    Electric Cloud today unfurled the Winter 2019 edition of the ElectricFlow platform for managing DevOps, which makes it easier for different classes of users to tailor the platform to meet their specific needs.

    Sam Fell, vice president of marketing for Electric Cloud, said the latest release of ElectricFlow allows end users to choose from different personas based on their role in the organization, and each persona has a user interface crafted to surface the level of detail they most likely require. That approach is intended to make the company’s DevOps platform more accessible to wider variety of end users, he said.

    The latest edition of ElectricFlow also adds a customizable customer login experience that is more task-oriented. Users can now add bookmarks/favorites to access specific pages faster.

    Finally, Electric Cloud is now including release and pipeline templates that make onboarding easier, based on user created events/triggers and code check-ins in a Git repository.

    Fell said that while DevOps platform such as ElectricFlow increasingly have incorporated higher levels of automation by relying more on machine learning algorithms, humans should not be left behind. Electric Cloud has been focusing more of its development effort on making it easier for DevOps professionals of all skill levels to derive value from the platform, he said, noting current DevOps platforms tend to make available far too much information than the average IT professional can ingest, added Fell.

    Less clear is how the complexity inherent in DevOps processes extends the time it takes for an organization to employ DevOps pervasively. While DevOps platforms are undoubtedly powerful, they also can be intimidating. In many instances, it’s simply easier for IT administrators to continue to rely on tools they already know to manage a specific task even when that tool is not as robust or rich as what might be accessible in a more modern DevOps platform. What often is ascribed to cultural IT inertia may have its roots in the simple fact that IT professionals are not always equally excited about having to learn and master new tools.

    The number of IT organizations that have been able to employ DevOps processes across their entire organization are still a comparative minority. Most organizations today have what can best be described as pockets of DevOps processes, usually driven by a small, cross-function team that is highly motivated to update a specific set of applications continuously. IT organizations are, of course, hoping to replicate the success of those teams across the rest of the organization. However, the rest of the IT organization doesn’t always have the same level of engineering skills—the spirit may be willing, but the initial DevOps hurdles needed to be overcome are simply too high.

    It may be a while before IT organizations sort this all out. More accessible tools are only one part of the equation. But IT leaders almost inevitably find that giving their teams access to easier tools will, at the very least, start moving their organization in the right direction.

    — Mike Vizard

  • ‘Choose Your Own DevOps’ with Electric Cloud’s Application Release Orchestration Platform, ElectricFlow

    New persona-based UI tailors ElectricFlow’s Unified Platform to accommodate all DevOps use cases, provides users real-time access to critical information and displays responsibilities most relevant to a specific role 

     

    SAN JOSE, Calif., February 12, 2019 — Electric Cloud (https://electric-cloud.com/), the leader in Adaptive Release Orchestration and Continuous Delivery, today announced its ElectricFlow Winter 2019 Release. The platform now provides persona-based UI enhancements, new pipeline and release automation options, and new service catalog updates to streamline workflow and simplify onboarding to help companies start fast and adapt quickly. 

     

    For more information about ElectricFlow and to download the free Community Edition, please visit: (https://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow).  

     

    ElectricFlow is unique in that it provides a single unified platform to support all DevOps use cases in one product, including application deployments, pipelines, release management, and DevOps Insight reporting. In ElectricFlow 9.0, we introduce a customized user experience for each DevOps role, with persona-based views. This provides a clear separation of duties for all DevOps roles, without requiring multiple products. 

     

    Companies of all sizes can now unlock the value of ElectricFlow even faster with a simpler and accelerated onboarding process. In turn, organizations can increase day-to-day efficiency and productivity for IT professionals by making the unified platform more user-friendly and personalized to each team member.  

     

    “Whether all companies realize it or not, their ability to prosper (or survive) relies on their ability to deliver high-quality software on business demand,” said Carmine Napolitano, CEO of Electric Cloud. “ElectricFlow is purpose-built to help drive business success by helping companies deliver IT in the easiest and most efficient way possible. Our unified solution doesn’t create more ‘tool silos’ within the enterprise, we make our shared DevOps and Continuous Delivery solution approachable for anyone. Connecting human capital to technology and process means that everyone can participate equally in an organization’s IT transformation effort.” 

     

    Choosing Your Own DevOps 

    The new persona-based customizable UI in ElectricFlow enables multiple users within an organization to tailor menus and options to their specific role. Putting this level of control in the hands of each user unlocks the value of ElectricFlow faster and gives everyone real-time access to the exact same information in a way that speaks to an individual’s responsibilities.  

     

    ElectricFlow now also includes an improved, customizable customer login experience that is more task oriented and intuitive. Users now also have the ability to add bookmarks/favorites for faster access to their desired pages, and easier access to personalized tasks and approvals.  

     

    With the addition of new, out-of-the-box release and pipeline templates, onboarding in ElectricFlow has never been easier or faster. Combined with enhanced pipeline and release triggers, the platform automatically kicks off pipelines and releases in a simple, easy way, based on user created events/triggers and code check-ins in Git. 

     

    As a way for an enterprise to retain unprecedented insight and control, an “approve by email” feature creates a one-click, secure and convenient solution for gate approvals and manual task completion directly from an email without having to log into the ElectricFlow platform. With RCC date ranges, teams also have the freedom to go back in time to compare releases and trends based on any date range with a user-friendly functionality similar to a DVR service.  

     

    Share This: New updates to @electriccloud ElectricFlow lets you “Choose your own DevOps” with #UI enhancements, pipeline and release automation options, and service catalog updates purpose-built to drive customer success https://electric-cloud.com/blog/2019/02/choose-your-own-devops-with-electricflow-winter-19 #DigitalTransformation 

     

    About Electric Cloud, Inc. 

    Electric Cloud helps software-driven companies like E*TRADE, GM, Hyundai, Intel and Samsung build and release applications and devices at any speed the business demands, with the acceleration, orchestration and insight needed to continuously improve their results. 

  • Electric Cloud Accelerates Enterprise Digital Transformation Efforts with Banner Year in 2018

    DevOps industry recognition, community initiatives, and product innovation underpins a record year for Electric Cloud as company grows new business by 95 percent in 2018 

    SAN JOSE, Calif., February 7, 2019 — Electric Cloud (https://electric-cloud.com/), the leader in Adaptive Release Orchestration and Continuous Delivery, today announced a record year in sales growth in addition to several company milestones and achievements underpinning a momentous year in community and market leadership for DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

    More and more companies across every industry recognize the strategic importance of software delivery, and they are making big bets on digital transformation to increase their competitive edge. “The strong traction we’re seeing amongst global enterprises is a direct result of the technical innovation and award-winning solutions we deliver to customers in support of their digital transformation efforts,” said Carmine Napolitano, CEO of Electric Cloud. “Our customers are living proof that large, complex organizations can make gigantic strides in their digital transformations. High performance at this scale isn’t just for unicorns anymore.”

    The De Facto Standard in DevOps and Continuous Delivery

    Numerous notable customer wins across finance, insurance, high-tech manufacturing and hospitality capped off an exciting year for Electric Cloud, with new business growing at 95 percent in 2018, all while setting the company’s highest ever subscription net retention rate, approaching 115 percent. The market is voting with its actions as both existing customers and new customers are dramatically increasing their investment in Electric Cloud’s products.

    Electric Cloud’s ElectricFlow has become the de facto standard for application release orchestration for many organizations, including AdvancedMD, AGCO, E*TRADE, Samsung, TopDesk and Qualcomm because of its ability to:

    • quickly implement and share secure, repeatable and adaptable pipelines that deliver mainframe, monolithic and microservices applications
    • deliver unprecedented, actionable insight into the health and status of enterprise releases, without requiring manual data collection and analysis
    • reliably scale as DevOps processes are rolled out across entire organization

    Supporting the Shift to Modern Technologies

    In 2018, Electric Cloud joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, with the goal of helping enterprises modernize legacy applications and infrastructure through next-generation techniques, including PaaS, Multicloud, Microservices, Containers, CI/CD, and DevOps.

    “We’re excited to welcome Electric Cloud as a member of the CNCF,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “As enterprise adoption of cloud native continues to grow, we see continuous delivery and release orchestration as critical to leveraging these technologies. We’re glad to have CNCF members like Electric Cloud that can help enterprise businesses along their cloud native journey, particularly in ensuring security and compliance from development to production.”

    Electric Cloud University

    In 2018, Electric Cloud invested in numerous resources to help advance the DevOps community and state of software delivery around the world. It launched Electric Cloud University, an online learning system that makes it easier for teams to get skills and certifications on DevOps topics like continuous integration, deployment automation and release orchestration (see Electric Cloud Launches Extended DevOps Training and Certification Program In Partnership with DevOps Institute). In addition, the company became the Founding Sponsor of the ’2019 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’ to help baseline and track DevOps skillsets across the global enterprise IT community.

    Leading From the Front

    In 2018, the company also received numerous awards and industry recognitions for its role in advancing DevOps and Continuous Delivery:


    About Electric Cloud, Inc.     

    Electric Cloud helps software-driven companies like E*TRADE, GM, Hyundai, Intel and Samsung build and release applications and devices at any speed the business demands, with the acceleration, orchestration and insight needed to continuously improve their results.

     

  • Electric Cloud Unveils ElectricAccelerator 11.0, the Build and Test Acceleration Platform that Saved Customers 2 Million Developer Hours in One Month

    New plug-and-play support for Android Open Source Project, accelerated embedded Linux builds based on the Yocto project, and cloud bursting for AWS and Kubernetes help businesses shrink development cycles and improve software quality

    SAN JOSE, Calif., January 30, 2019 — Electric Cloud (https://electric-cloud.com/), the leader in Adaptive Release Orchestration and Continuous Delivery, today announced ElectricAccelerator® 11.0, the leading build and test acceleration platform for software delivery. The new release introduces out-of-the-box support for accelerating embedded Linux builds based on the Yocto project, buildroot and Android platforms. In addition, a new cloud bursting feature for both AWS EC2 and Kubernetes environments enables customers to optimize infrastructure utilization and control costs without compromising performance.

    Download a 30 day free trial of ElectricAccelerator 11 at (https://electric-cloud.com/products/electricaccelerator/).

    With more and more devices becoming “smart,” even traditional hardware companies are finding themselves competing more at the software level. Electric Cloud’s ElectricAccelerator helps organizations create more time for experimentation and iteration by accelerating build times and shortening QA & security testing cycles.

    “In the month of December alone, just 20 of our customers reported saving more than 2 million developer hours on 291,000 builds,” said Eric Melski, Chief Architect for the ElectricAccelerator product. “For these organizations, getting innovation out the door fast matters, and giving teams the time they need to iterate on and test their software before release is also important!”

    Device manufacturers like Visteon, Zebra Technologies and Hyundai Mobis use ElectricAccelerator to ‘eliminate the wait’ for their developers, and stay ahead of the competition. “We’ve been using ElectricAccelerator for years to get 2-3x acceleration for over 800 engineers in our Linux devices group,” said the Build and Integration Manager at a Chicago, Illinois-based communication solutions provider. “It lets us build as fast as possible, using on-demand AWS infrastructure, without inflating our cost structure.”

    Join the upcoming webinar “ElectricAccelerator: Buying More Time” and learn about the new capabilities that can help dramatically shrink development cycles (https://electric-cloud.com/resources/webinars/electricaccelerator-buying-more-time/). 

    Additionally, businesses using ElectricAccelerator have been able to:

    • Shorten AOSP and Linux build times by a factor of 20
    • Reduce hardware costs by almost 60 percent by creating a private build cloud
    • Dramatically reduce late-stage issues by running tests and security scans more frequently as part of the CI cycle
    • Speed up Visual Studio/nmake/cygwinbuild times by a factor of 20
    • Easily migrate build clouds to Amazon EC2, and,
    • Replace slow starting VMs with dynamically created containers for each build

    The latest release of ElectricAccelerator also adds support of the latest version of Android Pie. Kernel builds and incremental builds are now even faster with this release. In addition, the platform now supports the following platforms:

    • CentOS 7.4 and 7.5 (64-bit)
    • Debian 9 (64-bit)
    • RHEL 6.10

    To learn more about how ElectricAccelerator is proven at enterprise scale, visit: (https://electric-cloud.com/products/electricaccelerator/).

    Share This: ElectricAccelerator 11.0 now available from @electriccloud to help businesses save more time by shrinking dev and test cycles https://electric-cloud.com/products/electricaccelerator/ #CI #cloud #embedded #Linux #Android

    About Electric Cloud, Inc. 

    Electric Cloud helps software-driven companies like E*TRADE, GM, Hyundai, Intel and Samsung build and release applications and devices at any speed the business demands, with the acceleration, orchestration and insight needed to continuously improve their results.

  • Electric Cloud Named a ‘Leader’ for Continuous Delivery Release Automation by an Independent Research Firm

    Company Achieves Highest Scores in Current Offering and Strategy, Recognized for Maintaining Strong Commitment to Supporting DevOps Community and for Being Ahead of Other Evaluated Vendors in Applying Advanced Analytics to Continuous Delivery

    SAN JOSE, Calif., November 26, 2018 — Electric Cloud (https://electric-cloud.com/), the leader in Adaptive Release Orchestration and Continuous Delivery, today announced it was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Delivery and Release Automation, Q4 2018, by Forrester Research Inc. In its CDRA Wave, Forrester evaluated companies based on the Strength of their ‘Current Offering’, ‘Strategy’, and ‘Market Presence’ and Electric Cloud achieved the highest scores in ‘Current Offering’ and ‘Strategy’.

    Download the full report here: https://electric-cloud.com/resources/whitepapers/forrester-wave-continuous-delivery-release-automation/

    The report is designed to help infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals make the right choice when looking for CDRA solutions for their development and operations (DevOps) automation.  In the report, author Charles Betz (Principal Analyst serving Infrastructure & Operations professionals) led an evaluation of 15 vendors and researched, analyzed, and scored them.

    “Electric Cloud offers one of the deepest CDRA products emerging from the RA market, and has maintained a strong commitment to supporting the DevOps community,” the Forrester report states. “Electric Cloud provides release automation across a wide variety of current and legacy technologies, and via its ElectricFlow product, provides higher-order release management and end-to-end digital value stream visibility. It also has its own build manager for organizations seeking a single vendor across the digital pipeline. Electric Cloud is ahead of other CDRA products evaluated in applying advanced analytics to continuous delivery (e.g. risk scoring).”

    “We believe being named a Leader in Forrester’s report and achieving the highest scores in the ‘Strategy’ and ‘Current Offering’ categories underscores Electric Cloud’s commitment to market-leading innovation,” said Carmine (CJ) Napolitano, CEO of Electric Cloud. “ElectricFlow provides game-changing control and visibility into complex enterprise pipelines and releases – across any combination of monolithic, mainframe and microservice-based applications. As our customers continue to make big bets on DevOps, we help them safely adapt to, and take advantage of, the massive and continual technological shifts underway. We work hard every day to empower our customers to transform software releases from a chore into a true competitive advantage.”

    As noted in the report, Electric Cloud also places a heavy emphasis on supporting the DevOps community. “DevOps doesn’t come in a box, it requires skilled people to make it work,” continued Napolitano. “Electric Cloud has a long history of supporting and educating the DevOps community through its #c9d9 educational video podcast series and co-founding of the DevOps Enterprise Summit with Gene Kim and IT Revolution.”

    Building on this education and community focus, Electric Cloud earlier this year launched a unique training and certification program in partnership with The DevOps Institute called “Electric Cloud University” to provide IT and DevOps professionals the skills and confidence they need to help drive digital transformations, and not be run over by them.

    In addition, the Electric Cloud is also the founding Platinum Sponsor for the upcoming “2019 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report” to help our community identify and address critical skills gaps across the global IT community. Eveline Oehrlich, former Vice President and Research Director at Forrester, is the lead research analyst for the report.

    To take the skills survey, please visit (https://www.research.net/r/K9WD2XC).

    We believe our focus on vision, strategy, product excellence, community support and individual growth makes Electric Cloud the defacto standard for Enterprise Release. Market leaders including Scottrade, Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Huawei, and GM choose ElectricFlow because it provides:

    • A way to implement and share secure, repeatable and adaptable pipelines to deliver mainframe, monolithic and microservices applications
    • Unprecedented, actionable insight into the health and status of enterprise releases, without requiring manual data collection and analysis
    • A solution that will reliably scale as DevOps processes are rolled out across additional groups entire organization

    For more information about ElectricFlow and to download the free Community Edition, please visit: (http://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow). 

    Share This: .@electriccloud named a ‘Leader’ in @forrester’s #ContinuousDelivery and Release Automation WAVE for 2018 https://electric-cloud.com/resources/whitepapers/forrester-wave-continuous-delivery-release-automation/  #DevOps #Leadership

    About Electric Cloud, Inc.
    Electric Cloud’s Adaptive Release Orchestration platform helps organizations like E*TRADE, HPE, Intel and Lockheed Martin confidently release new applications and adapt to change at any speed demanded by the business, with the analytics and insight to measure, track, and improve their results.

     

  • Electric Cloud Extends Continuous Delivery Platform

    Electric Cloud Extends Continuous Delivery Platform

    Electric Cloud is making available a software-as-a-service (SaaS) pricing option available for its ElectricFlow application release management and continuous delivery (CD) platform.

    In addition, version 8.5 of ElectricFlow adds support for a Kanban-style pipeline view, object tagging for custom reporting and improved searchability and a continuous integration (CI) dashboard to track and analyze build processes, failures and successes.

    The SaaS option doesn’t fundamentally change the existing Electric Cloud pricing model as much as it does provide a different location to host ElectricFlow, said Electric Cloud CTO Anders Wallgren. Pricing for ElectricFlow is still based on nodes and the number of users rather than consumption.

    The CI dashboard, meanwhile, provides organizations that have one or more types of CI platforms being employed with visibility into, for example, Jenkins, Git and Bamboo pipelines using a single dashboard. Many organizations today have multiple CI pipelines in place largely because of the preferences of individual developer teams, Wallgren noted.

    The Kanban-style pipeline also provides a mechanism for managing multiple application development projects based on a just-in-time process originally developed by Toyota that is employed to identify bottlenecks in car manufacturing. That same issue, of course, applies to software development, where the number of dependencies between various modules is increased exponentially. That issue is becoming even more pronounced as organizations move to build and deploy cloud-native applications based on various types of runtimes. DevOps teams now can approve and observe release progress and deployment status within ElectricFlow in near real time, Wallgren said.

    Finally, tagging functionality on all objects allows release managers and product owners to create more granular, real-world reports quickly and easily. Universal data segmentation replaces code-based report creation and can be applied across any object type.

    Wallgren noted that adoption of DevOps best practices generally continues to advance at uneven rates. Electric Cloud is now working closely with the DevOps Institute on an online training and certification program dubbed Electric Cloud University. The goal is to increase the number of IT teams that are exposed to modern CD processes at whatever pace they choose. Electric Cloud is making four certifications available: Build Accelerator, Test Accelerator, Administrator and Agile Master.

    Wallgren said the next major frontier when it comes to continuous delivery will be applying deep- and machine-learning algorithms to tame what has become an exceedingly complex management challenge. DevOps toolchains continuously create vast amounts of data originating from numerous tools, and machine learning algorithms can harness that data to automate a range of DevOps processes in a way that is not only makes those processes more accessible, but also easier to demonstrate how an application release meets a specific compliance mandate. To achieve that goal, Electric Cloud has been embedding more algorithms into every release cycle of ElectricFlow, says Wallgren.

    It may take a while longer for algorithms to minimize all the complexity associated with continuous delivery today. But as DevOps continues to evolve, it’s apparent that many of the manual tasks that have often conspired to limit adoption of DevOps will one day soon disappear.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Electric Cloud Introduces ElectricFlow 8.5, Unveils Industry-First Support for Both SaaS and On-Premises Delivery

    Flexible Enterprise SaaS Delivery Model, Kanban-Style Pipeline View and Object Tagging with a Continuous Integration Dashboard Allow Teams of Any Size to Start Fast and Adapt Easily

    SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 18, 2018 – Electric Cloud (https://electric-cloud.com/), the leader in Adaptive Release Orchestration and Continuous Delivery, today announced a new SaaS consumption option for the industry’s first Enterprise SaaS and on-premises Application Release Orchestration (ARO) offering, ElectricFlow. ElectricFlow now includes a Kanban-style pipeline view, object tagging for custom reporting and enhanced searchability, and CI dashboarding capabilities to track and analyze build processes, failures and successes.

     For more information about ElectricFlow and to download the free Community Edition, please visit: (https://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow). 

    ElectricFlow SaaS allows DevOps teams of all sizes to get up and running without incurring on-premise implementation costs, and gives teams developing cloud-native or serverless applications a way to keep all their development pipelines and tools in the cloud. Most enterprises also have on-premise assets that they need to manage. ElectricFlow SaaS seamlessly connects to on-premise servers and tools to enable deployment automation, pipeline and environment management, and release orchestration inside and outside of the firewall.

    “More and more, large enterprises are exploring ways to include cloud-native applications and tool chains in their on-premises digital transformation projects,” said Torsten Volk, managing director at Enterprise Management Associates. “It’s important for DevOps tools vendors to make their offerings available on a variety of platforms to support those efforts. I’m glad to see Electric Cloud getting ahead of the market with this new release of ElectricFlow.”

     DevOps Your Way

    The new Kanban view in ElectricFlow 8.5 provides a familiar, easy-to-use management and execution view of pipelines, stages and individual tasks on one screen. Connected directly to the automation and orchestration, users can approve and observe release progress with real-time pipeline and application deployment status. 

    “Moving to a DevOps culture and adjusting to a new pace, new processes, and new toolsets has been a challenge for many of our people,” said Gary McKay, Scrum Master at global toll-free registry service Somos. “ElectricFlow’s new Kanban view coupled with comprehensive pipeline-as-code means everyone on the team gets exactly the kind of working environment they need to help us accelerate our digital transformation.”

    New tagging functionality on all objects allows release managers and product owners to quickly and easily create more granular, real-world reports. Universal data segmentation is now possible across any object type (applications, pipeline stages, environments, etc.) and replaces code-based report creation.

    New CI Dashboarding creates data-driven visibility into CI processes and bottlenecks, so that architects and application teams have clear understanding of builds from within the release pipeline. ElectricFlow works with all CI tools, including Jenkins, Bamboo and Git to give teams unprecedented insight into the value, cost and risk associated with every release, eliminating the need for difficult, extensive custom coding with tools like Hygeia.

    “This release further solidifies our position as the de facto standard for ARO by doubling down on giving customers the flexibility to unleash the power of ElectricFlow for anyone – wherever and however they need it,” said Carmine Napolitano, CEO of Electric Cloud. “This allows us to meet our customers where they are, and simply ‘plug-in’ unified governance and orchestration across an ever-changing array of tools, stacks, and processes. Adapting to change more quickly than your competition is a competitive advantage, and ElectricFlow eliminates much of the anxiety associated with releasing software when adopting new processes or trying new technologies.”

    Share This: .@electriccloud’s Adaptive Release Orchestration Platform, ElectricFlow, Now Available as #SaaS with new #Kanban view, Tagging functionality and #CI Dashboard to let you Do #DevOps Your Way! https://electric-cloud.com/blog/2018/10/electricflow-8-5-devops-your-way/ 

    About Electric Cloud, Inc.
    Electric Cloud’s Adaptive Release Orchestration platform helps organizations like E*TRADE, HPE, Intel and Lockheed Martin confidently release new applications and adapt to change at any speed demanded by the business, with the analytics and insight to measure, track, and improve their results.