CloudBees Build Acceleration 2020.10.00 preview release notes

The Build Details page in the cluster manager has been redesigned and expanded to include performance analysis and visualizations derived from CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight. This enhancement enables users and administrators to easily access the most critical performance data for builds from any system that can access the cluster manager web interface, even if the annotation file for the build is not accessible. The Build Details page now includes several new sub-tabs:

This release extends the Android build integration to support builds based on AOSP 11.0.0_r3.

This release extends Bitbake integration with support for packages that build using ninja instead of make, resulting in improved performance for Bitbake/Yocto users (EC-13789). In addition, the bb2anno utility has been enhanced to aggregate the data in <metrics> sections of the individual annotation files that are incorporated into the combined annotation file, to improve "whole build" performance analysis (EC-13956).

This release adds support for configuring agent security settings during installation and after installation with ecconfig. Security settings configured using these methods will be preserved during future upgrades. Prior to this change, configuring agent security settings required modification to the agent startup scripts, and those settings were not retained during upgrades (EC-13407).

This release introduces a new command-line option for emake, --emake-create-output-dirs. When enabled, this will cause emake to automatically and efficiently create output directories for targets when running in GMake emulation modes. In addition, the details of the implementation are such that this will avoid provoking conflicts even in builds that have no history file or have an incomplete history file. This feature is a superior alternative to mechanisms such as mkdir -p $(dirname $@), directory creation sentry files, and others that have commonly been employed with make-based build systems to solve the problem of creating output directories for build targets (EC-13680).

This release adds "build signatures", a hash computed from the serial ordered list of output targets in the build. This value can be used to identify builds that are substantively "the same" to facilitate comparisons and identification of trends across sets of like builds. The hash uses emake-root-relative target names, so the signature will be the same even if the absolute location of the build has changed (for example, as in continuous integration builds, or between developers working on the same project from their own copies of the source tree). The build signature for a build can be found in the annotation properties.

This release also adds a new "totality" metric, which is the percentage of jobs that were not up-to-date in the build. For a full, from-scratch build, this metric should be 100 in most builds. For a "no touch" build, this metric should be close to zero. For incremental builds, the value will be somewhere between those values, depending on the portion of the output that was rebuilt.

This release includes an updated preview release of CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight with the following enhancements:

In addition this release includes a variant of CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight specifically for command-line use on Linux, called einsight-cmd. This variant has no dependencies on GUI libraries, making it ideal for use in "headless" automation contexts.

There are no changes in supported platforms in this release.

Documentation: CloudBees Build Acceleration supported platforms

None.

None.

Because the agent to Cluster Manager communication uses TLS by default, the agent image used for AWS EC2, GCP or Azure cloud bursting must also be upgraded to the 11.3 release or later in order for cloud bursting to work.

Starting in August 2019, the release strategy for CloudBees Build Acceleration is updated to add a “preview” release in addition to the standard long-term support (LTS), maintenance (patch), and hotfix releases.

The release numbering for the preview releases uses a new <year>.<month>.00 numbering scheme. For example, 2020.08.00.

For details about the new release strategy, see the CloudBees maintenance lifecycle policies web page.

As of version 11.1, perpetual license files include a Version field and are therefore no longer transferable to succeeding product versions. At run time, to be considered valid by the Cluster Manager, the license file must have a Version that equals or exceeds the version of the Cluster Manager itself. Version checks consider only the major.minor version (for example, a license for 11.1 is valid for 11.1.0, 11.1.1, 11.1.2, and so on).

eMake authenticates with the Cluster Manager via the eMake/Cluster Manager protocol version to ensure that the eMake and Cluster Manager licenses match. If the license has no Version field, it will be considered invalid by the 11.1 Cluster Manager.

You can upgrade just the Cluster Manager, but starting with version 11.1, if you upgrade eMake or agents, you must also upgrade the Cluster Manager. When you upgrade the Cluster Manager, you must also acquire a new license if you are currently using a perpetual license.

You can upgrade to new patch releases (but not new feature releases) without acquiring a new license. For example, if your current license specifies 11.1, then you can use a Cluster Manager with version 11.1, 11.1.1, 11.1.2, and so on. Also, for example, if your license specifies 12.0, then you can use a Cluster Manager with version 12.0, 12.0.1, 12.0.2, and so on, as well as 11.x.

The Administration > Licenses page in the Cluster Manager web UI has a Version column, which provides the product version of each license in the list. This information is blank for a license with no explicit version (such as an evaluation license).

Make sure that you import a compliant license into the Cluster Manager before upgrading. For assistance, see CloudBees Support. For details about importing a license, see Logging In and Enabling Licensing - Importing Your License. (EC-13170 and EC-13154)

CloudBees no longer distributes the JDBC drivers for MySQL or Oracle databases. To use one of these databases, you must download its driver directly from the Oracle website, then copy it to the appropriate directory on the Cluster Manager server, and then restart the Cluster Manager service. For details, see Installing JDBC Drivers for MySQL or Oracle Databases.

If you copy the emake executable to a new location, you must also copy the execserver executable to that location. By default, the path to the execserver executable is /opt/ecloud/i686_Linux/32/bin/execserver (for 32-bit eMake) or /opt/ecloud/i686_Linux/64/bin/execserver (for 64-bit eMake).

The identifier that is used to find certain types of jobs in the eMake history file changed in version 8.0. After an upgrade from version 7.2.2 or older versions to version 8.0or newer versions, users should regenerate their history files by running their first build with the --emake-history=create option to avoid unnecessary serializations. This build might have more conflicts than normal (but subsequent builds should return to normal).

As of version 9.1, for new CloudBees Build Acceleration subscription licenses, the number of builds that you can run concurrently is license-limited. The noLicenseWaitTime performance metric indicates the amount of time that a build spent waiting for a concurrent build license because the number of concurrent builds reached the license limit. Also, as of version 9.1, JobCache is not separately licensed and is now included with the concurrent build license.

Customers using pre-9.1 CloudBees Build Acceleration licenses may continue to use those licenses, including the licenses for the JobCache add-on.

For details about licensing for concurrent builds, see the Logging In and Enabling Licensing. (EC-12095)

CloudBees Build Acceleration documentation for this preview release is available at the CloudBees Build Acceleration documentation page.

Documentation on the website is updated periodically.

Built into the Cluster Manager are:

To contact CloudBees Support, go to https://support.cloudbees.com/, and then click Submit a request to submit or see your support tickets.

Be prepared to provide your:

Go to https://support.cloudbees.com/hc/en-us/sections/360006494811 to find in-depth explanations of specific topics and solutions for specific problems.