CloudBees is pleased to announce the availability of the CloudBees Build Acceleration 2020.11.00 preview release.

Security fixes

Updates to third-party packages (EC-14004)

In this release the cluster manager is updated to use Apache 2.4.46, PHP 7.4.12, and OpenSSL 1.1.1h.

New features

Build Details Recommendations tab

This release adds a new Recommendations tab to the Build Details page in the cluster manager, where the user can find recommendations for improving build performance based on analysis of the build. The report checks for several known performance anti-patterns, such as missing or incomplete history, jobcache misses, hard-coded make invocations and more. Recommendations are prioritized according to the estimated impact on performance.

Build Details Performance tab

The Performance tab on the Build Details page in the cluster manager has been expanded with several additional elements:

  • A graph of agent utilization over the duration of the build.

  • A prioritized summary of the critical path in the build, to enable users to quickly identify those jobs that have the greatest impact on the build duration.

  • Dozens of additional low-level performance metrics.

JobCache enhancements

This release extends the javac jobcache type to include support for kotlinc and known aliases for the Kotlin compiler. In addition, this release adds improved support for inline files in Windows jobcache, resulting in increased cache hit rates on typical Windows builds when using jobcache.

Annotation enhancements

This release adds a new <configuration> section to annotation files, which describes the actual values used for every user-configurable option in emake. This eliminates ambiguity about the settings used in each build by providing a clear record that can be referenced when debugging or during performance analysis.

CloudBees Build Acceleration Insight

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

  • A new Recommendations report which analyzes build performance and provides recommendations of ways to improve performance.

  • Optimizations to the Diagnostics report reduce runtime of the report up to 20%.

New platform support

This release adds support for the following platforms:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3

  • Ubuntu 20.10

Behavior changes

The jobcache version has been updated to version 32, as some of the enhancements in this release are incompatible with the previously recorded data in the cache. Builds using the new version will automatically repopulate the cache again from scratch. Users may wish to manually delete the old cache data to reclaim disk space.

No database support changes.

No browser support changes.

Resolved issues

diagnostics.json sometimes contains invalid JSON content (EI-863)

If diagnostics found in the build output included unprintable characters, such as ANSI escape sequences, those characters were copied to diagnostics.json without being escaped in a manner suitable for JSON. The invalid JSON content caused the Diagnostics tab on the cluster manager Build Details page to fail to render. With this fix, such characters are escaped appropriately, so the Diagnostics tab works as expected.

Deleting builds from the cluster manager deletes too much from build_logs directory (EC-13982)

A defect in the cluster manager where deleting the logs for builds that were deleted via the cluster manager web interface or with cmtool resulted in the deletion of build logs for unrelated builds. With this fix, only the logs for the deleted builds are deleted.

Cluster manager starts more agent containers than Kubernetes can sustain (EC-13660)

When using Kubernetes cloudbursting, the cluster manager failed to specify a CPU count when making agent container requests. This could result in the Kubernetes cluster trying to run more containers on a host than that host could reasonably support. With this fix, the cluster manager specifies a CPU count when starting new agent containers, enabling Kubernetes to correctly limit total deployment and balancing loads across hosts in the Kubernetes cluster.

Installation notes

Cloud bursting

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.

New CloudBees Build Acceleration release strategy

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.

CloudBees recommends that you upgrade to the preview release and test these features in a controlled environment before rolling them out to production.

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

Version enforcement in Cluster Manager licensing

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)

Hardware requirements
  • The recommended total amount of RAM for an agent host is 2 GB per agent plus the amount of RAM normally needed to execute your build. For example, if you are running four agents, and your build normally needs 16 GB, you will need ((2 * 4) + 16) = 24 GB.

Backing up before you upgrade
  • The upgrade process does not preserve the existing files. Back up the /opt/ecloud/<arch>/cloud directory for Linux or the C:\ECloud\<arch> folder for Windows to a safe location.

  • For additional security, back up the database by following the recommended procedure from your database vendor.

Installing JDBC drivers for MySQL or Oracle databases

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 relocate eMake

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).

Regenerating history files after an upgrade

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).

Concurrent build licensing

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)

Known issues

Linux kernel issue that affects CloudBees Build Acceleration performance

Affected kernel versions:

  • RHEL kernel versions later than 2.6.18-194.32 and earlier than 2.6.32-131

  • Ubuntu Linux kernel versions 2.6.31, 2.6.32, 2.6.33, and 2.6.34

Symptoms:

Affected systems might encounter reduced performance on both ext3 and ext4 file systems. Symptoms might include

  • hung_task_timeout_secs messages in system dmesg logs

  • Widely variable agent availability (entering and exiting agent “penalty” status frequently)

  • Contention over the ecagent.state file

  • Slower builds (with unexplained variances)

To help determine if this issue exists, run the dmesg | grep hung_task_timeout command. hung_task_timeout errors show that this issue is present. Contact your kernel provider for another version of the precompiled kernel.

Fixes for systems running RHEL 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, and 6.0

You should consider upgrading to 2.6.32-131 (RHEL 6.1) or downgrading to 2.6.18-194.32 (RHEL 5.5).

Other known issues
  • Android M is not compatible with CloudBees Build Acceleration 11.1. You must use Android M with CloudBees Build Acceleration 10.0.

  • If you kill a build manually, and the agents running on an Amazon EC2 instance fail to connect, the instance will continue to run. You must kill the instance manually.

  • If the Cluster Manager goes down while agents are running on an Amazon EC2 instance, they will still connect but will not be associated with a resource. You must kill the corresponding instance manually.

  • The cmtool importData command does not import license properties (such as maxAgents ). To work around this issue, re-import the license after using importData. (EC-12371)

  • You cannot control breakpoints from the Cluster Manager. (EC-12322)

  • If Apache fails to start properly after a new Cluster Manager installation, reboot the system.