Electric Cloud,
the leader in enterprise Continuous Delivery and DevOps automation,
today announced a major new addition to its product line,
ElectricFlow
Release.
ElectricFlow Release helps organizations speed application releases by
streamlining and automating software deliveries into highly organized
and well-choreographed release pipelines. For software teams adopting
DevOps and Continuous Delivery, it replaces checklists and spreadsheets
with a single, unified view across both traditional and Continuous
Delivery style application releases to increase reliability,
transparency and predictability while lowering risk.
To
help organizations of all types migrate to DevOps and Continuous
Delivery, Electric Cloud will offer ElectricFlow Release through a
standard enterprise licensing option and, for smaller teams and initial
projects, through a free, fully-functional community edition. To
download the free version please visit: http://electric-cloud.com/downloads/electricflow/communityedition/.
"DevOps
and Continuous Delivery adoption often happens in pockets in the
enterprise, increasing the frequency of releases that need to be
promoted to production," said Steve Brodie, CEO for Electric Cloud.
"Traditional release management processes are not designed to handle
these more frequent and iterative software delivery approaches, and
ElectricFlow Release makes each Continuous Delivery pipeline a
repeatable, governed and standardized process."
Designed
for production operations and IT release managers, ElectricFlow Release
allows software delivery teams to collaborate, plan and execute all
functions within the application lifecycle in a unified and highly
automated fashion. It provides shared control and visibility over the
entire software delivery lifecycle, which results in more frequent and
predictable software releases.
Amy
DeMartine, senior analyst serving infrastructure and operations
professionals for Forrester Research, agrees that release automation is
vital. "Adoption of release automation is in its infancy, but it needs
to grow up fast to support superior customer experiences by continually
delivering quality interactions and applications," she wrote along with
analyst Kurt Bittner in The Forrester Wave: Application Release Automation, Q2 2015.
"Automating the release of applications is a key pain point for I&O
organizations today." However, as noted earlier in the report, it is
the "critical final step in the delivery pipeline of applications to
improve the customer experience."
Marc
Priolo, software configuration manager at Urban Science, says:
"ElectricFlow Release will help us know exactly what software is
installed where, and how it got there. This will reduce the risk of
releasing the wrong version of the software to the wrong environment."
Core functionality of ElectricFlow Release includes:
- Visual Pipelines: to model a reusable path to production across multiple stages and environments.
- Release Planner: to plan, coordinate, build, execute and communicate the status of releases to stakeholders.
- Environment
Templates: provides support for dynamic Cloud and hybrid environments
to provision, configure and de-commission resources on-demand.
- Release Dashboard: to review status of all environments and applications involved in a release.