DEVOPSdigest

Electric Cloud announced a new version of ElectricFlow that simplifies the promotion and usage of approved automation, provides a programmatic way for Developers to onboard applications, and provides increased visibility into deployments and releases across any DevOps toolchain.

“A few years ago, the ‘Consumerization of IT’ boosted job satisfaction and organizational productivity by inviting employees to ‘Bring Your Own’ Devices into the workplace,” said Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud. “Today, ElectricFlow enables the ‘Consumerization of CD (Continuous Delivery)’, by allowing organizations and teams to ‘Bring Your Own’ processes, patterns, practices, tools and other technology into a secure and well managed DevOps toolchain. Our aim is to make it easy for both Dev and Ops practitioners to ship software in a way that ‘works best for them.’”

To help Development and Operations teams who are looking to automate and coordinate software deployment and release, ElectricFlow now includes:

- Customizable Self-Service Catalog with out-of-box templates for pipelines, applications, and environments to accelerate time to value and facilitate object re-use

- An easy way for Developers to define applications, environments and dependencies as code to ensure consistent, predictable downstream results

- Release and Deploy Analytics Dashboards to enhance visibility into the status and health of releases and pipelines

A new Self-Service Catalog in ElectricFlow offers on-demand templates for common stacks/environments, pipelines, patterns, applications, and DevOps processes. Teams can then customize or add to this catalog to create a shared repository of approved, reusable automation.

This self-service, centralized and scalable solution gives Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams a way to empower developers with the tools they need to move fast, while maintaining consistency, governance and compliance. This allows organizations to balance team ownership and flexibility with standardization and control to achieve increased manageability, system-level visibility and lower operational costs.

Coupled with push-button access to advanced features such as Container and Microservices Orchestration, Automated Rollback and Rolling Deployments, ElectricFlow takes the "rocket science" out of Continuous Delivery, and provides I&O teams a safe way to keep up with the demands of the business by making software deployments and releases a boring, routine affair.

DevOps is all about eliminating silos. ElectricFlow is a DevOps Release Automation solution that spans the entire Continuous Delivery process – from code check-in to production release – with a single, unified platform. It provides the entire organization a central point of governance, collaboration and visibility to eliminate the gaps that can introduce friction and errors in the end-to-end process.

The unified platform allows users to interact with and manage all DevOps processes and platform features in a way that works best for them – either as code, or via the product’s GUI. This enables teams to “treat their pipelines like a product,” to continuously improve application delivery and decrease the cost and risk of deployments.

In addition to application onboarding options like GUI and DSL, ElectricFlow now allows Developers to automate the generation of application, environment and pipeline models directly from common CI tools. Using a simple JSON manifest file, developers can “shift-left” application definition as part of the Build stage. This ensures consistency of the deployment package when used by downstream teams.

In addition to faster onboarding and improved self-service, new ElectricFlow Release and Deploy Dashboards provide users with detailed reporting about the health of their commit, deployment and release pipelines. This secure, role-based and in-depth view can be filtered by time, project or other characteristics to give teams the fast feedback they need to spot trends and visualize application deployment and release lead times, successes/failures, frequency, throughput and duration.

“By taking the manual effort, guess-work and anxiety out of software delivery, AdvancedMD will be able to innovate more quickly, which gives us an advantage in this fast-moving, regulated market,” said John Esser, Senior Director of Data Center Operations and SaaS at AdvancedMD. “ElectricFlow provides a secure, unified platform for cross-team collaboration and visibility on deployments and releases that won’t force us to sacrifice compliance for velocity.”

Electric Cloud’s newest release is available now.