Flexagon is working on our next major release of FlexDeploy, version 5.0, which is planned for general availability in October. In this article, I’ll share a glimpse into the content of the release and how you can get access to the new capabilities at the end of every sprint.
A little background might be helpful… As you would expect, we use an agile software development process which results in working features, documentation, etc. for each sprint. At the end of a sprint, we demonstrate all the new features internally and use a fully automated process to create shippable versions of FlexDeploy. Of course, our entire CI/CD process is based on FlexDeploy, and we use popular tools such as Jira, Bitbucket, SoapUI, TestNG, Selenium, SonarQube, and Checkmarx, as part of our end-to-end toolchain. We automatically push the new versions out to Docker Hub for easy download.
While we continuously release new capabilities via our GA version of FlexDeploy (ex. 4.6.0.3 was released a few days ago), we are also making the Release 5 enhancements available for non-production use and following the 4.6.1, 4.6.2, 4.6.x. naming scheme. FlexDeploy 4.6.1 and 4.6.2 have already been made available and can be used to get familiar with what was delivered in the first two sprints. Flexagon takes feedback from our customers and partners so we can have a continuous feedback cycle which ensures ongoing and rapid learning and improvements in feature/function, usability, etc.
FlexDeploy 5.0 includes investments in the following areas:
• Microservices, Containers, Container Orchestration Engines, Serverless
• Advanced support for Continuous Integration with Pipeline and Release features
• Enablement for additional Cloud IaaS and PaaS scenarios
• Oracle E-Business Suite post cloning optimizations
• Rollback flexibility
• REST API enhancements for third-party integration and external management of FlexDeploy
• Purge optimizations for Pipelines and Releases
• Ease of adoption via additional tutorials, Docker images with samples, etc.
FlexDeploy 4.6.1 and 4.6.2 (the first two sprint of the 5.0 stream) include many new features, including:
• Docker plugin enhancements
• webMethods plugin enhancement to Trading Network (TN) components
• ServiceNow plugin provides additional integration options
• REST API updates for managing topology, snapshots, projects, workflows, release, security, tasks, and more
• FlexDeploy Tutorials for Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle SOA, ADF/WebLogic, WebLogic Resource Management, and Tomcat/Java
• Enhancements to EBS support related to SQL processing error condition handling and AOL object types
• WebLogic plugin enhancements to allow Sub Deployment for Foreign JMS Server configuration
• Ability to run containerized FlexDeploy plugins on a Docker container
• Internationalization enhancements, support for additional Locales such as English (Australia, India, New Zealand), Portuguese (Brazil), German (Germany)
• Partial Build/Deploy enhancement for Shell plugin, allowing helper functions to manage status
HERE is a link to the FlexDeploy 4.6.2 image in Docker Hub. Enjoy!
