DEVOPSdigest

XebiaLabs announced the launch of XL Release version 5.0 as well as XL Deploy version 5.5 and a new DevOps ChatBot.

XL Release allows companies to automate, orchestrate and gain visibility into their software release pipelines at enterprise scale. XL Release 5.0 simplifies the way stakeholders get insight into the software delivery process – from IT executives to program managers to developers. The new configurable dashboards and productivity features are designed to help manage complex, multi-level and interdependent software release pipelines.

“As releases happen faster and pipelines grow more complex, enterprises know they need to do more than automate their release processes. Just as importantly, they need a way to understand, organize, manage and monitor large amounts of interdependent release information,” said Derek Langone, CEO at XebiaLabs. “We designed the new capabilities to meet the needs of large enterprises that are focused on achieving business results – whether they are working with existing middleware and big data systems, or implementing new container or IoT initiatives.”

XL Release 5.0 Highlights

• Customizable Release Dashboard: Release teams now have new, easy-to-use dashboards that show what’s in each release at a glance. The dashboards can be custom-configured to display a team’s most important status indicators and metrics, such as overall release progress, compliance and audit details, features delivered, issues found, and open tickets resolved. They can also show information from other tools that play a part in the software delivery pipeline, such as JIRA, Jenkins, XL Deploy or ServiceNow. XL Release’s new dashboards provide a new level of visibility to everyone who has a stake in the release, from the CIO to the Risk Management team to the Release Manager or the DevOps team.

• Advanced Release Pipeline Orchestration: XL Release 5.0 delivers the unique ability to manage interconnected pipelines as a whole unit, so it’s easy to determine when a delay in one pipeline will affect delivery for an entire business feature. New releases can now be automatically launched from within another release, releases become automatically linked and teams can quickly see how all releases fit together. This capability helps organizations manage more complex release patterns: they can automatically orchestrate dozens of related releases, manage dependencies between releases, group related releases, and easily divide the work between teams. XL Release 5.0 also adds a new expanded table view that lets teams better organize and manage complex, interdependent releases.

XL Release 5.0 automatically tracks the impact of dependent releases on the current release, so delays at any level of the process can be quickly discovered and fixed.

By automating even more of the release process and automatically managing dependencies, enterprises can release software faster, with fewer errors. Organizations get the detailed visibility they need to monitor the process and keep track of their features throughout the software development lifecycle with a unified view that spans third party tools. With XL Release’s added visibility and control, DevOps and Continuous Delivery initiatives become more effective and efficient.

In conjunction with XL Release 5.0, XebiaLabs also released version 5.5 of its popular XL Deploy product, which provides enterprise-scale deployment automation for any environment, from Docker to mainframes. The new version integrates provisioning of cloud environments as part of the deployment process, eliminating the need to wait days or even weeks to get the cloud resources that teams require. Developers can now more easily “self-service”: they can spin-up and tear down cloud environments as part of their automated deployment, and the system ensures that necessary controls are met. This capability helps teams save money by making the most efficient use of cloud resources. It also gives them deeper visibility into – and better control of – deployments for both applications and environments.

To help DevOps teams better communicate, XebiaLabs recently introduced a new ChatOps feature. Many DevOps teams already use chat tools extensively to work more efficiently and bring together distributed teams. The new plugin for XL Deploy facilitates communication and increases productivity by letting teams monitor deployment activity, trigger deployments and troubleshoot incidents from inside their chat tool of choice, such as HipChat or Slack.