Our Latest & Greatest in Continous Delivery: New features on tap

We’re always working to improve the XL Platform and roll out new features to existing products, and believe it or not regular updates to our Continuous Delivery tools roll out using our own in-house continuous delivery process! Here is a sneak peak at what is in the pipeline.

Increased visibility and traceability

As interest in Continuous Delivery continues to take off, we’re seeing more and more requests for dashboards and visualizations, not just for the technical team, but to provide clear insight into the CD pipeline for managers, customers, and other non-technical stakeholders. [caption id="attachment_7260" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Click to Expand[/caption] We’re also getting more questions about how organizations with existing processes can get started with continuous delivery without boiling the ocean… “evolution, not revolution” is key. As a result, we’ve updated and expanded our dashboards and reports in XL Release and added a new, configurable Value Stream Analysis view that automatically highlights areas of your pipeline that are prime candidates/targets for improvement. [caption id="attachment_7259" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Click To Expand[/caption]

Greater flexibility and extended support

Another day, another PaaS, container, or cloud technology: new tools and frameworks are popping up all the time. Users want to try them out and deploy to them, which is why XL Deploy’s plugin API is already designed to make it easy to add support for new middleware technologies. What we have learned over the last 18 months and what our users have taught us, has now allowed us to take XL Deploy extensibility to the next level. XL Deploy 4.1 provides a new, fully backwards-compatible, rule DSL on top of our existing plugin API. This makes it even easier to configure and extend XL Deploy to support the latest and greatest new “cool tech” in a couple of lines of XML, without coding. The rule DSL is currently in beta, so please try it out.  We’re very much looking forward to your feedback. We’ve also added a preview version of the new UI extension framework to XL Deploy, as well as a bunch of additional plugins to XL Release.

Compare configurations in live environments

It works in one environment, but not in another…how often have we all run up against that problem? XL Deploy already supports comprehensive, extensible discovery for WebSphere and other middleware, as well as comparison and versioning of all configuration items in XL Deploy’s repository. After hearing about configuration drift problems in more and more types of middleware environments, we’ve decided to combine these features with a simple, to-the-point configuration drift report. It features smart container matching and attribute filtering designed to highlight the important stuff, so you don’t have to trawl through thousands of irrelevant default properties. It also can report on discrepancies between XL Deploy’s repository and the live environment. As an added bonus, the report interface introduces the first HTML5 UI components to XL Deploy…watch this space!

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You can try out the XL Platform today! Visit http://www.xebialabs.com/products/xl-platform/ for more details, or contact us to arrange a free 30-day trial at (866) 656-4408 or sales-us@xebialabs.com.