CloudBees CD/RO v10.8.0

Released: September 2, 2022

CloudBees CD/RO v10.8

CloudBees is pleased to announce the v10.8 long-term support (LTS) release of CloudBees CD/RO. With this release, we added several new features and system improvements, including:

  • Parameter enhancements.

  • Additional Self-Service Catalog filtering options.

  • Updates to the New data retention policy page.

  • An enhanced Applications and Procedures list UI.

  • Horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA) for deployment components.

Refer to New features below for more information.

Security fixes

This release includes the following security updates:

  • Upgraded the Kubernetes client to address potential vulnerabilities. [BEE-22374]

  • Upgraded the Apache commons configuration to address potential vulnerabilities. [BEE-22265]

  • Upgraded okhttp3 packages to address potential vulnerabilities. [BEE-22646]

  • Upgraded the Java Development Kit (JDK) 11.0.12 to address potential vulnerabilities. [BEE-22092]

  • Upgraded the Sonarcube-scanner.cli to address potential vulnerabilities. [BEE-22654]

New features

Self-Service Catalog filtering and tagging

Catalogs and catalog items now support filtering. Catalog items now support tags, which you can also use for filtering. For more information, refer to Service Catalogs.

Horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA)

CloudBees CD/RO now includes HPA support for the following deployment components:

  • Server

  • Web

  • Repository

For more information, refer to Install CloudBees CD/RO within Kubernetes.

Feature enhancements

Parameter enhancements

The Create/Edit Input Parameter is updated to include:

  • A multi-select option for the Dropdown Menu DSL. This option adds the ability to select more than one item in a dropdown menu in the runtime.

  • A Dynamic Default Value option for Text Entry, Dropdown Menu, and Radio Selector parameters. This checkbox option adds the ability to specify a default DSL value to evaluate based on parameter dependencies. This option is only available for parameters with dependencies.

    Formal parameter definitions based DLS scripts are updated to recognize property aliases, such as /myProject. Support is implemented for the following shortcuts and formal object parameter options in DSL, validation DSL, and default value DSL:

  • Catalog Item

    • myProject

    • myCatalog

    • myCatalogItem

  • Procedure

    • myProject

    • myProcedure

  • Pipeline

    • myProject

    • myPipeline Pipeline Manual Task

    • myProject

    • myPipeline

    • myStage

    • myTask

Data retention policy page updates

The New data retention policy page is updated to include the following:

  • You can now manually enter a field name.

  • A new Is not in Operator type is available in the criteria section to specify which items must not be in a selected collection.

    For more information, refer to Data retention.

Other features and enhancements

The Applications and Procedures list pages include updated UI elements to improve user experience.

Performance improvements

None.

Plugin enhancements

CloudBees CD/RO plugins catalog

The CloudBees CD/RO plugins catalog is available on the CloudBees CD/RO documentation site.

For more information about plugin support and versioning, refer to Plugin Concepts.

Plugin updates

EC-DslDeploy 4.1.3

Upgraded third party libraries.

EC-ServiceNow 3.2.1

Fixed an issue with parameters retrieval for new plugin configurations. The ServiceNow San Diego release is now supported.

EC-SonarQube 2.1.1

Updated Sonar scanner CLI version to 4.7.0.2747.
Plugin Development Kit enhancements

Resolved an issue in PDK 3.8.2 that caused checkboxes values to always be true.

Resolved issues

BEE-18096

Implemented a new cleanupStalledJob API for ectool, ec-perl, and ec-groovy.

BEE-18181

Fixed an issue that caused a conflict between regular and intrinsic properties in the evalDsl API.

BEE-19816

Fixed a typo in HibernateConfiguration.java that broke server integration tests on Windows.

BEE-20653

Reverted DSL changes from BEE-10409.

BEE-21278

Jobs are aborted when microservice deployment parameters are not resolved.

BEE-21279

Set AGENT_MAX_HTTP_THREADS = 0 during install to enable the default calculation for the number of threads in the pool based on the number of CPU cores and to prevent Java agent failures.

BEE-21996

Updated the background deleter to enable the removal of soft-deleted releases.

BEE-22149

Fixed an issue with registering all users from the AD/LDAP group in the manual task with approvers.

BEE-22196

Added support for passing credential parameters as credential references into DSL-based catalog items.

BEE-22272

Fixed an issue with a NullPointerException (NPE) that caused all jobs to stop processing.

BEE-22495

When exporting the DSL with EC-DslDeploy:generateDslToDirectory, the generated DSL is now ordered consistently.

BEE-23000

Fixed an Update inventory issue that occurred when the component artifact version contained a property reference with the myApplication shortcut.

Behavior changes

None.

Installation notes

For complete installation and upgrade information, refer to CloudBees CD/RO on Kubernetes and Install CloudBees CD/RO on traditional platforms.

Apache ZooKeeper required update

The ZooKeeper version bundled with CloudBees CD/RO v10.5 was updated from v3.4.6 to v3.8.0. CloudBees CD/RO v10.5+ requires ZooKeeper v3.8.0. For installation and upgrade instructions, refer to Install ZooKeeper and Upgrade a clustered environment.

Legacy services applications and container entities

In CloudBees CD/RO v10.3, the legacy Services applications and Traditional applications with containers were deprecated and removed. Before you upgrade to CloudBees CD/RO v10.3 or later, you must migrate your applications to the current microservices application model.

Also, before upgrading from CloudBees CD/RO v10.2 or earlier you must delete all legacy services and containers. This will prevent upgrade failure, a database consistency break or inability to run the validateDatabase API.

Legacy webhook triggers

As of v10.8, webhook triggers configured and scheduled before v10.1 have been deleted. Polling triggers configured and scheduled prior to v10.1 continue to work, but they are not available from the UI to review or run.

CloudBees CD/RO on Kubernetes

Sample CloudBees CD/RO server and agent Helm chart values, found here, provide CloudBees’s default installation values. The CloudBees CD/RO images.tag value associated with v10.8 is 10.8.0.156807_3.2.20_20220831.

CloudBees CD/RO Universal Base Image (UBI)

The actual UBI associated with v10.8 is 8.6-754.1655117782.

Upgrading gateway agents

All gateway agents that meet the following criteria must be updated to CloudBees CD/RO v10.2+:

  • Your enterprise implements a multi-zone environment.

  • Agent versions are a combination of pre-v10.2 and v10.2+.

  • The access route to a v10.2+ agent is configured through a pre-v10.2 gateway agent.

Configuring autostart services for Linux installations

Linux installations that you perform as a non-root user or without sudo permissions cannot automatically start the CloudBees CD/RO server, web server, repository server, or agents. This means that you must set up service autostart after installation is complete. Refer to Configure autostart for non-root/non-sudo Linux installations to learn more.

Upgrading your CloudBees CD/RO environment
Before starting an upgrade, make sure to back up your existing CloudBees CD/RO data.
Upgradable versions

Upgrades to CloudBees CD/RO 10.x are supported only from ElectricCommander 5.0. For upgrade instructions, refer to the Upgrade on traditional platforms.

Updating the MySQL configuration before upgrading

Since release 8.0.1, CloudBees has instructed customers using a MySQL database to use the following two lines in their MySQL configuration:

init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci, NAMES utf8'
skip-character-set-client-handshake

Before upgrading CloudBees CD/RO, you must remove these lines or comment them out. Otherwise, jobs will not start.

Ensuring the correct default MySQL default collation

Make sure that the default collation for the MySQL database schema is set to utf8_unicode_ci or utf8_general_ci and that no table in the schema overrides this. The CloudBees CD/RO server checks this configuration on startup and logs errors in the server log if it is not set correctly.

If the collation is not configured correctly, then entering non-ASCII text into CloudBees CD/RO might cause errors. For example, setting a release name to a non-ASCII value and attempting a search causes an exception.

If your MySQL database schema or any tables in it are set to a non-UTF-8 collation order, refer to the Knowledge Base article KBEC-00385 - Converting a MySQL Database From Latin-1 to UTF-8 for detailed instructions about safely converting your schema to UTF-8. [NMB-26521, NMB-27459]

Upgrading agents that run the ec-groovy job step in multizone deployments

In multizone CloudBees CD/RO deployments, CloudBees CD/RO agents that are in a different zone than the CloudBees CD/RO server must be upgraded to version 9.0 or later for the ec-groovy job step to run successfully on those agents. You must also upgrade the gateway agents that lead back to the server’s zone including those in any zones in between the agent’s zone and the server’s zone. [NMB-27490]

For details about multiple zones and gateway agents, refer to Zones and gateways.

Removing the SSL 2.0 Client Hello or SSLv2Hello protocol from your security configurations

CloudBees recommends removing the SSL 2.0 Client Hello or SSLv2Hello protocol from your security configurations for all components. [NMB-27934, NMB-29326]

  1. Upgrade agents to the latest operating system version for security reasons.

  2. If this warning appears on the Automation Platform UI:

    Note: We recommend removing `SSL 2.0 Client Hello` format from server configuration and upgrade older agents as indicated on the Cloud/Resources Page to avoid security risk.
    ▼

    then enter the following command on the CloudBees CD/RO server:

    $ ecconfigure --serverTLSEnabledProtocol=TLSv1.2
    ▼
Upgrading the CloudBees Analytics server

This section provides information about upgrading the CloudBees Analytics server.

Potential breaking change: Elasticsearch update

The Elasticsearch version shipped with CloudBees Analytics v10.2 has been updated from v6.6.2 to v7.10.2. As such, this update may create breaking changes in your custom reports. All changes related to the new version are described in Elasticsearch documentation. The following change may affect your reports the most. [BEE-2717]

  • Accessing missing document values throws an error. The doc['field'].value throws an exception if the document is missing a value for the field field.

    To check if a document is missing a value, you can use doc['field'].size() == 0.

  • It is not possible to upgrade CloudBees Analytics v9.0.1 and below to CloudBees Analytics v10.2.0 and above. The installer exits with an error and an appropriate message when such an update is attempted. If you need to upgrade CloudBees Analytics v9.0.1 and below, you must first upgrade to a version between 9.1.0 and 10.1.0, or 9.0.2 and above. After that, you can upgrade CloudBees Analytics to v10.3.0 or higher. [NMB-31030]

  • For previous CloudBees Analytics upgrades from v9.0.1 and below: CloudBees Analytics data may contain obsolete indices that are incompatible with CloudBees Analytics v10.2.0 and above. To work correctly, it is necessary to re-index these indexes before an upgrade. The installer prompts you to do this before upgrading.

    • In console mode and UI mode, the installer displays the following prompt if outdated indexes are detected:

      One or more Elasticsearch indices were created in an obsolete version of Elasticsearch.
These indexes must be re-indexed for the upgrade to be successful.

Do you want to start the reindexation? [n/Y]
      ▼

      After an affirmative answer, the installer automatically re-indexes and continues the upgrade.

    • In silent mode, the installer reindexes automatically.

  • Backing up and restoring custom settings

    The CloudBees Analytics installer overwrites the elasticsearch.yml configuration file with a new file. This file includes a Custom Settings section, which lets you add Elasticsearch settings not managed by the CloudBees Analytics server without being lost during an upgrade. The installer preserves the settings in the Custom Settings section. [NMB-25850]

  • Upgrading CloudBees Analytics clusters

    The principle of forming a cluster in CloudBees Analytics has changed in v10.2 due to the update of Elasticsearch v7.10.2. In this regard, an additional action is required to upgrade to CloudBees Analytics v10.2 or later:

    When updating the first master node, you must explicitly specify that it is the first node to be updated. If this action is not performed, any cluster that is being updated is placed out of service.

    All installers have been instrumented to accommodate this change. Refer to Upgrade the CloudBees Analytics server for more details. [BEE-2717]

  • CloudBees Analytics server configuration notes

    For a production environment, CloudBees recommends that you install the CloudBees Analytics server on a system other than systems running other CloudBees CD/RO components (such as the CloudBees CD/RO server, web server, repository server, or agent). If you must install it on the same system (such as for testing or other non-production or trial-basis situations), refer to CloudBees Analytics server with other components for details.

    If your CloudBees Analytics server is configured with multiple nodes in a Kubernetes environment, you must pre-generate your certificates. For more information, refer to Install CloudBees CD/RO within Kubernetes.
CloudBees CI operations center configurations

After upgrading to CloudBees CD/RO v10.7 from v10.0.x, you may need to rework your CloudBees CI operations center configurations.

  • In v10.0.x, CloudBees CI operations center URLs specified in configurations are silently appended at runtime with the /cjoc path component.

  • In v10.1, URLs are used as defined in configurations. The /cjoc component is not appended.

To maintain pre-v10.1 runtime compatibility, the v10.1 upgrade process modifies CloudBees CI operations center URLs in existing configurations by hardcoding the /cjoc path component. You need to rework existing URLs in configurations where appending the /cjoc path component is inappropriate.

Configuration notes

Performing a full import

During a full import, the import operation might hang in the following scenarios. To import successfully into CloudBees CD/RO 8.0 and newer versions, perform the appropriate workarounds [CEV-15447, CEV-11873]:

  • A manual process step in a process has formal parameters. The workaround is to remove the entry related to the property sheet for the job step that is associated with the manual process step.

  • In the exported XML file from the earlier release, two pipelines are in different projects, and both pipelines have no gate tasks. The flow associated with the pipeline is duplicated under both projects. The workaround is to remove the flow element under the projects.

Limitations

When an application is cloned from one project (the original project) to another (the destination project), the tier maps for the application point to the environments with the same names in the destination project. To deploy the application to the environments in the original project, you must create tier maps connecting the application to those environments.

Known issues

BEE-7512

With CloudBees CD/RO v10.2.1 and earlier, the DSL Import service catalog fails for grouped tasks.

BEE-10612

CloudBees CI build details are not present after project import.

BEE-14581

The MeanLeadTime report does not work correctly when Elasticsearch only has pipeline runs but no release runs.

BEE-14889

The UI add a new line when performing a Save Changes on Source code synchronization, causing Include objects to not be applied.

BEE-14933

The UI does not allow the transfer of artifacts across zones.

BEE-16705

CloudBees CI jobs time out when triggered, resulting in pipeline failures. Increase the COMMANDER_HTTP_TIMEOUT property.

BEE-17259

When a custom data retention policy schedule is set to run once, the data is not purged after archiving. To purge data after archiving, use a repeat schedule or the global data retention setting.

BEE-17812

The Preview tab does not display a correct list of objects to be archived for data retention rules.

BEE-19742

When you save DSL for a dropdown menu, the code is evaluated to catch syntax errors. This evaluation is not the same as when the parameter is used. This can result in a property reference error because the properties may only be available when the parameter values are set. A workaround is to use a try-catch statement where the property path is a property that is not available in the definition context:

def value
try {
  value = getProperty(propertyName: 'property path').value
} catch (e) {
  return []
}
▼

BEE-20205

CloudBees CI job tasks fail with a $[] branchName in the definition.

BEE-20536

When using Postgres with change tracking enabled, EcAuditStrategy errors may appear in the server log. This is a known issue, but is not expected to affect system performance.

BEE-20645

Traditional full XML imports and exports with ScmSync objects fail with the java.langIllegalStateException. As a workaround, delete all scmSync objects before you export, and then recreate them after the import. CloudBees recommends using generateDsl or evalDsl to export/import ScmSync objects.

NMB-30095

Browser redirects to port 2080 during first navigation to CloudBees CD/RO deployed from CloudBees Software Delivery Automation and Flow Helm charts.

NMB-24734

SyncArtifactVersions procedure completes with success, rather than showing a warning, when manifest is missing and overwrite = false.

NMB-24949

When you use the Automation Platform UI to upload and publish artifact files with non-English characters in their file names, the operation fails with the following error: Upload file: Exit code 1: ERROR: Publish failure: Unexpected retrieval exception for repository error.

NMB-26021

Modifications of LDAP user data (such as email addresses) on an Active Directory server after registration in CloudBees CD/RO do not appear properly in user details (in the Automation Platform UI, the Deploy UI, or ectool) until the CloudBees CD/RO server is restarted.

NMB-26962

(Microsoft Windows platforms only) If the Elasticsearch cluster, which is used by CloudBees Analytics, is in the red state (in Elasticsearch this means that it only partly functions and some data is unavailable) then upgrade, reconfigure, and uninstall operations will not work. Since the Elasticsearch service cannot be stopped when a cluster is in a red state, you must stop the Elasticsearch service process from the task manager before running the installer for these actions.

NMB-28135

The Microsoft Edge browser does not work with SAML 2.0 and a self-signed certificate during redirection from the identity provider to the service provider. Edge is not recommended for sign-in via SAML 2.0.

NMB-29486

The LANG environment variable must be set to en.US.UTF-8; otherwise, the upgrade fails. Refer to KBEC-00452 - Error installing CloudBees CD/RO 10.0.x when Lang environment variable is different than en.US.UTF-8 for details.

CEV-11106

When an application with snapshots created in CloudBees CD/RO 6.1 or earlier is cloned and a project containing this application is imported to CloudBees CD/RO 6.3 or higher, the import operation fails.

CEV-12363

Error prompts for runtimes started by a schedule are not visible if the schedule was created with a missing configuration.

CEV-12429

The stage inclusion status in the Release Dashboard changes color after a stage is renamed.

CEV-14689

No error prompt appears for failed tasks and retry tasks during a pipeline runtime.

CEV-15122

If an application process step cannot expand to its child steps (because of an invalid run condition or an invalid formal parameter) then the step is not retried even if it uses "retry on error" error handling. The job eventually completes with an error.

CEV-15829

The retry count for group tasks or rules using "automated retry on error" is missing from the Pipeline runtime page.

CEV-16245

Multiple mapped environments with the same name from different projects are not supported in email notifications.

CEV-16250

A project import might not include the path-to-production view.

CEV-16930

Jobs might not appear upon drill-down into the "Clusters With Most Deployments" widget in the CloudBees Analytics Microservices Dashboard if the service does not contain a deploy step in the process.

CEV-18531

All subreleases of a release must appear before the release in the DSL for the release-to-subrelease link to be created.

CEV-19239 CEV-19259

The ability to search by assignee in a Deployment Report is not available in the CloudBees Analytics report editor.

CEV-21426

If Release Command Center was set up for JIRA for user stories and defects, and the JIRA project name was mapped to the release project name using the field mapping ` projectName:releaseProjectName`, then before upgrading to 10.0 the field mapping must be updated to mention the actual release project name using the following field mapping format: "release-project-name-in-CloudBees CD/RO":releaseProjectName

CEV-23624

Approval by email on manual tasks should not expect parameters.

CEV-25150

If you use the ectool export to export your system configuration from a previous release and then use ectool import to import the same configuration to a CloudBees CD/RO 10.0 server, some out-of-the-box content introduced in the releases since the version from which the full export was done, such as new or updated plugins, new catalog items, and persona-based menu items, may be missing in the CloudBees CD/RO server UI. It is recommended to use ectool export and ectool import only between servers at the same version.

CEV-26700

SSO does not work unless PHP configuration is changed due to a security-related request. Workaround: Change session.cookie_samesite to "Strict" in /opt/electriccloud/electriccommander/apache/conf/php.ini and restart the web server.

CEV-28704

CloudBees CD/RO v10.1 introduced new triggers and an updated UI for them. Pre-v10.1 triggers will continue to work but there is no UI to review or run them.

CEV-28779

Before using the export command to perform a full data export from the CloudBees CD/RO database, delete any legacy definitions and references to service objects from applications and releases.

N/A

You can revert changes only for high-level design objects such as applications procedures, procedure steps, workflow definitions, and state definitions.

Restarting the CloudBees CD/RO server while new records are created for all tracked objects might take at least as long as an export or import of all projects (10 to 40 minutes for a large project).

N/A

Enabling Recursively Traverse Group Hierarchy might impact system performance when the LDAP group hierarchy is traversed. The amount of impact varies with the configurations of the CloudBees CD/RO and LDAP servers, the depth of group hierarchy in the LDAP server and the network latency between the servers. Make sure that your directory provider can handle the additional load for supporting nested group hierarchy traversal.

N/A

System performance might decrease if you disable change tracking at the server level and then re-enable it. Change tracking is enabled by default. For details about using change tracking, refer to change tracking.