DEVOPSdigest

Electric Cloud announced its latest version of ElectricFlow, an end-to-end DevOps platform to provide native, push-button support for advanced deployment strategies (such as Blue/Green, Canary, and Rolling Deployments).

ElectricFlow enables IT to frequently and reliably deploy mission-critical applications at scale and avoid service interruptions to their end users.

“DevOps implementations are highly individual, and what works for one may not work for another, creating disparate DevOps tool portfolios and resulting in a need for greater investment and skills,” wrote David Paul Williams and Thomas E. Murphy in a March 2016 Gartner Research Report.

“We appreciate the effort it typically takes for Application Support teams to provide superior quality of service and zero-downtime for their hundreds or millions of demanding end-users,” said Steve Brodie, CEO of Electric Cloud. “This latest version of ElectricFlow fully automates the process of creating and executing advanced deployment strategies, making them error-free, easy to adopt, and simple to use.”

As a significant upgrade to what is otherwise achieved with cumbersome scripting or complex, ad hoc, and environment-specific workflows, the new Rolling Deployment capability in ElectricFlow provides a robust, model-based approach and intuitive GUI, making it easy to configure and re-use Rolling Deployments across many projects and pipelines in the enterprise.

Today, Rolling Deployments are mostly confined to Production environments, where the scale (and risk) of application deployment is the largest. By providing Rolling Deployments as an integral capability, ElectricFlow enables teams to “practice” rolling deployments even in lower environments (such as QA, Staging, or Pre-Production), without requiring additional management overhead or investment in specialized resources. The result is faster, more reliable and rehearsed deployments at enterprise scale, with zero-downtime.

In addition to the breakthrough push-button Rolling Deployments capability, the new version of ElectricFlow includes a number of other new features, such as:

- Environment Reservation and Calendaring – increases visibility and reduces the chance for cross-team conflict during deployments through a new rich calendar view. This allows users to reserve environments for applications, pipelines and releases; define black-out/maintenance windows; and, offer policy-driven prioritization and conflict handling.

- Automated Environment Discovery – reduces onboarding time and effort while eliminating errors. A “one-click” automated process accelerates modeling; automatically populates resource and environment parameters; and, offers a new extensible plug-in architecture.

- Full-stack Dependency View – provides IT-Ops and App Support teams a way to model and visualize dependencies among applications, middleware and infrastructure. Users can define middleware and their infrastructure requirements per application; capture and report on infrastructure/middleware capabilities across environments; and, ensure dependencies are met.

- Built-in IDE for ElectricFlow DSL with Object Export enhancements – makes it easy to define, debug, version and store your “Process as Code” in any Source Control Management system. The built-in IDE provides an efficient way to modify application models, deployment processes and release pipelines as code and instantly see the changes reflected in the graphical interface.