Introduction to CloudBees Flow

3 minute read

CloudBees Flow® is an enterprise-grade DevOps Release Automation platform that simplifies provisioning, build, and release of multi-tiered applications and microservices. Its model-driven approach to managing environments, applications, and microservices allows teams to coordinate multiple pipelines and releases across hybrid infrastructure in an efficient, predictable, and auditable way.

  • Automating workflows, application or microservice deployments, or pipelines.

  • Modeling and deploying one application or microservice for more than one use case.

  • Deploying all, some, or specific versions of artifacts in an application.

  • Keeping track of changes to tracked objects including applications or microservices, artifacts, jobs, resources,and workflows, referred to as Change Tracking .

  • Optimizing how resources are used in dynamic environments.

Web-Based System

At its core, CloudBees Flow automation platform is a web-based system for automating and managing the build, test, deployment, and release process. It provides a scalable solution and solves some of the biggest challenges of managing these "back end" software development tasks, including:

  • Time wasted on script-intensive, manual, home-grown systems that

  • Are error prone

  • Do not scale well

  • Have little or no management visibility or reporting

  • Multiple, disconnected build and test systems across locations, resulting in:

  • Redundant work

  • Inability to share or reuse code files across teams

  • Hard to manage build and test data

  • Slow overall build and release cycles that directly impact:

  • Release predictability

  • Time-to-market

Automation Platform

The automation platform has a three-tier architecture, an AJAX-powered web interface, and a first-of-its-kind build and release analytic capabilities for reporting and compliance. With this solution, your developers, release engineers, build managers, QA teams, and managers gain:

  • A shared platform for disseminating best practices and reusing common procedures

  • The ability to support geographically distributed teams

  • Continuous integration and greater agility

  • Faster throughput and more efficient hardware utilization

  • Visibility and reporting for better project predictability

  • Better software quality by integrating and validating against all target platforms and configurations

For examples of CloudBees Flow architecture configurations, see CloudBees Flow Architecture .

What Makes CloudBees Flow Unique?

CloudBees Flow provides enterprise-class speed and scalability for software build and release management. It is easy to install and use on a simple build, yet it scales to support the largest and most complex build and test processes. CloudBees Flow distributes jobs in parallel across multiple resources for faster overall cycle time.

CloudBees Flow supports multiple teams working in multiple locations and programming in multiple languages in an environment that can be centrally managed. Shared assets and reuse make individual teams more efficient by eliminating duplicate work and gives organizations the power to deploy cross-company standards.

CloudBees Flow’s unique analytics provide visibility into one of the best indicators of project success: compiled, tested, working code. CloudBees Flow’s analytics database stores all build and test information for real-time and trend reporting to give your organization the power to collect pinpoint statistics and to gain visibility into important productivity metrics such as trends in error rates.

Additionally, out-of-the-box reports provide information about cross-project status and build trends by project and resource utilization. CloudBees Flow’s integration with virtual lab automation (VLA) solutions also lets you snapshot or reproduce a specific build for auditing or troubleshooting.

CloudBees Flow provides unified process automation across the entire build-test-deploy life cycle and across heterogeneous tools via integrations with leading ALM tools. Integrations with SCM tools enable continuous integration and triggering of builds whenever code is checked into the specified repository or branch. When used with VMware Lab Manager, CloudBees Flow can dynamically provision either physical or virtual resources without manual intervention. This feature delivers efficient, dynamic resource provisioning and reduces development and QA dependence on IT operations.