Big news for customers who are already using or planning to use our vRealize products! Today we are launching new versions of vRealize Code Stream and vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps. In this blog I will go through the most important changes, updates and new features of vRealize Code Stream 2.1 and will follow up with a separate blog on vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps 2.1.1 and vRealize Orchestrator 7.1.0.
vRealize Code Stream 2.1:
New Out of the box Integrations:
- Cloud Foundry: This integration now enables pipeline tasks to handle deployment operations of cloud native applications on Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry being an open source project, this integration support offerings from various vendors including Pivotal Cloud Foundry and IBM Bluemix among others.
- Bamboo: Atlassian Bamboo is one of several popular Continuous Integration tool like Jenkins and Microsoft Team Foundation Server. With this integration, build plans on the Bamboo server can be triggered from within Code Stream pipelines – just like triggering a task in Jenkins or TFS.
- JIRA: Atlassian JIRA is widely used for project and issue tracking. This integration enables automatic updates to JIRA issues, such as creating, updating and closing issues bases on the conditional logic modeled in a Code Stream pipeline.
- Bugzilla: Bugzilla is an open source defect tracking systems. This integration enables creating and updating defects to Bugzilla as part of a Code Stream pipeline.
- Socialcast: Socialcast is VMware’s enterprise collaboration platform. Integration with Socialcast enables posting pipeline execution updates such as pipeline execution start, completion or failed status to appropriate Socialcast groups.
Brand New Dashboard
vRealize Code Stream 2.1 introduces a new Dashboard tab. This offers a bird’s eye view of specific pipeline executions and pertinent information that a user is interested in. Furthermore, the new Dashboard is customizable on a per user basis and shareable with other users within the same tenant.
Some of the features of the Dashboard view are:
- Status of all the individual tasks’ execution across the stages is displayed in a compact format, like a progress bar – reducing the need to click on individual executions to bring up the pipeline view. This is also useful when there are concurrent executions for a pipeline that can be monitored in one glance.
- Status of specific task execution statuses within the pipeline execution can also be viewed in lieu or along with the overall status view.
- Ability to add additional columns representing crucial pipeline input values passed to trigger an execution – this enables viewing pipeline inputs such as Build-ID, Triggered by, Commit ID, running time etc. along with the pipeline execution status that can be viewed at a glance without additional clicks.
- Each of the tasks represented in the overall status view are clickable to see more details such as input and output parameter values.
Improvements to User Experience
- Look and feel: The new 2.1 UI is faster and more responsive: view transitions and loading performance has been improved. Several interactions such as endpoint configuration, default view on login and user preferences have also been improved.
- Improved on-screen help: Contextual help has been improved during pipeline modeling. Release Managers will have more documentation around task input/output and descriptive alert messages. This is in addition to the improved online documentation.
Other Enhancements
Nested pipelines: In vRealize Code Stream 2.1, pipelines can be modeled such that pipeline executions can trigger other pipelines. This enables modeling more complex pipeline logic such as roll-backs or reusing automated testing logic (e.g. systems integration testing) between different application pipelines.
Script plugin: the script plugin now uses a faster engine to execute Bash and PowerShell scripts. Further, this version of the plugin also adds capability to specify scripts inline and it also supports consuming dynamic property values at execution time.
Support for external vRealize Orchestrator: Release managers can now model tasks that invoke workflows on remote instances of vRealize Orchestrator (in addition to the embedded instance of vRealize Orchestrator).
Any questions? Just contact VMware or send me an email to: [email protected]
