CloudBees Assurance Program

2 minute read

The CloudBees Assurance Program is a rigorous vetting process that tests and verifies plugins are enterprise-grade. Verified plugins in the CloudBees Assurance Program are both independently stable and tested as a whole to ensure compatibility with each other and the CloudBees CI instance. This provides greater stability and security for CloudBees CI environments.

Instances of CloudBees Jenkins-based products are automatically enrolled in the CloudBees Assurance Program to ensure your instances run efficiently and are free of potential plugin incompatibilities.

The interface for the CloudBees Assurance Program compliance checking and enforcement is the Beekeeper Upgrade Assistant. It provides a centralized view of the monitored plugins, recommended actions, and configuration options to further improve the stability and security of your CloudBees CI instance.

The Beekeeper allows administrators to review and install upgrades for plugins. Additionally, administrators can enable automatic upgrades or downgrades of plugins that are not in compliance with the support policy for the CloudBees Assurance Program.

When an instance is enrolled in the CloudBees Assurance Program, two changes are made: the Beekeeper displays the current compliance status with CloudBees Assurance Program and the Update Center configuration is modified to show the CloudBees Assurance Program Update Center.

The CloudBees Assurance Program Update Center modifies the list of "Updates" and "Available" plugins on the Manage Plugins page to hide plugins that are incompatible with CloudBees Assurance Program due to dependencies on plugin versions that are outside of the CloudBees Assurance Program.

CloudBees Assurance Program enforcement

Automatic plugin upgrade and downgrade together comprise CloudBees Assurance Program Enforcement, which is only possible if your instance is enrolled in the CloudBees Assurance Program. When CloudBees Assurance Program Enforcement is applied, plugins are automatically modified to the version in the CloudBees Assurance Program. Plugins that are not part of the CloudBees Assurance Program are not changed.

Plugin tiers for the CloudBees Assurance Program

Plugins in the CloudBees Assurance Program are categorized into three tiers. Each tier represents the level of testing that is performed on the plugins.

Plugin support is restricted to the versions specified by the CloudBees Assurance Program for the installed version of the product. See Plugin support policies for details.
Table 1. Plugin tiers
Tier name and number Description

Verified/proprietary, Tier 1

Plugins that have been verified through the CloudBees Assurance Program to meet critical use cases, are stable when used in conjunction with supported CloudBees products, and can be used with confidence.

Compatible, Tier 2

Plugins that have a reputation for their quality but have not undergone end-to-end testing with supported CloudBees products.

Community maintained and unknown, Tier 3

Plugins that CloudBees has not verified. These plugins should be used with caution in a given installation because their stability is unknown. These plugins are supported on a commercially-reasonable basis. This usually implies guidance on using the plugins and diagnosis but are not subject to the CloudBees Support SLA.