DEVOPSdigest

Electric Cloud announced a major new addition to its product line, ElectricFlow Release.

ElectricFlow Release helps organizations speed application releases by streamlining and automating software deliveries into highly organized and well-choreographed release pipelines. For software teams adopting DevOps and Continuous Delivery, it replaces checklists and spreadsheets with a single, unified view across both traditional and Continuous Delivery style application releases to increase reliability, transparency and predictability while lowering risk.

To help organizations of all types migrate to DevOps and Continuous Delivery, Electric Cloud will offer ElectricFlow Release through a standard enterprise licensing option and, for smaller teams and initial projects, through a free, fully-functional community edition.

“DevOps and Continuous Delivery adoption often happens in pockets in the enterprise, increasing the frequency of releases that need to be promoted to production,” said Steve Brodie, CEO for Electric Cloud. “Traditional release management processes are not designed to handle these more frequent and iterative software delivery approaches, and ElectricFlow Release makes each Continuous Delivery pipeline a repeatable, governed and standardized process.”

Designed for production operations and IT release managers, ElectricFlow Release allows software delivery teams to collaborate, plan and execute all functions within the application lifecycle in a unified and highly automated fashion. It provides shared control and visibility over the entire software delivery lifecycle, which results in more frequent and predictable software releases.

Amy DeMartine, senior analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals for Forrester Research, agrees that release automation is vital. “Adoption of release automation is in its infancy, but it needs to grow up fast to support superior customer experiences by continually delivering quality interactions and applications,” she wrote along with analyst Kurt Bittner in The Forrester Wave: Application Release Automation, Q2 2015. “Automating the release of applications is a key pain point for I&O organizations today.” However, as noted earlier in the report, it is the “critical final step in the delivery pipeline of applications to improve the customer experience.”

Core functionality of ElectricFlow Release includes:

- Visual Pipelines: to model a reusable path to production across multiple stages and environments.

- Release Planner: to plan, coordinate, build, execute and communicate the status of releases to stakeholders.

- Environment Templates: provides support for dynamic Cloud and hybrid environments to provision, configure and de-commission resources on-demand.

- Release Dashboard: to review status of all environments and applications involved in a release.