9th BIT Consulting, the African partner of XebiaLabs, has announced the availability of a new version of XebiaLabs’ XL Release and XL Deploy. These DevOps and Continuous Delivery tools help enterprises to orchestrate and control large and complex software releases, empowering them to produce software faster and with fewer errors. At the same time, the company has released a new DevOps ChatBot.
XebiaLabs is a recognised leader in DevOps and Continuous Delivery software tools. 9th BIT Consulting is a South African company operating throughout Africa, specialising in the implementation of DevOps and Continuous delivery projects, assisting clients like Sanlam with visibility, automation and control to deliver software faster and with less risk.
Barry de Waal, chief executive: strategy and sales at 9th BIT Consulting, says: “The new version of XL Release allows companies to automate, orchestrate and gain visibility into their software release pipelines at enterprise scale. XL Release 5.0 simplifies the way stakeholders, from IT executives to programme managers to developers, get insight into the software delivery process. The new configurable dashboards and productivity features are designed to help manage complex, multi-level and interdependent software release pipelines.”
“As releases happen faster and pipelines grow more complex, enterprises know they need to do more than automate their release processes. Just as importantly, they need a way to understand, organise, manage and monitor large amounts of interdependent release information,” says Derek Langone, CEO at XebiaLabs. “We designed the new capabilities to meet the needs of large enterprises that are focused on achieving business results – whether they are working with existing middleware and big data systems, or implementing new container or IoT initiatives.”
Unlike other release orchestration tools, XL Release 5.0 automatically tracks the impact of dependent releases on the current release, in order to ensure delays at any level of the process can quickly be discovered and fixed.
By automating even more of the release process and automatically managing dependencies, enterprises can release software faster, with fewer errors. Companies get the detailed visibility they need to monitor the process and keep track of their features throughout the software development lifecycle with a unified view that spans third party tools. With XL Release’s added visibility and control, DevOps and Continuous Delivery initiatives become more effective and efficient.
In conjunction with XL Release 5.0, XebiaLabs also released version 5.5 of its popular XL Deploy product, which provides enterprise-scale deployment automation for any environment, from Docker to mainframes. The new version integrates provisioning of cloud environments as part of the deployment process, eliminating the need to wait days or even weeks to get the cloud resources that teams require.
“Developers can now more easily self-service: they can spin-up and tear down cloud environments as part of their automated deployment, and the system ensures that necessary controls are met,” adds De Waal. “This capability helps teams save money by making the most efficient use of cloud resources. It also gives them deeper visibility into – and better control of – deployments for both applications and environments.”
To help DevOps teams better communicate, XebiaLabs recently introduced a new ChatOps feature. Many DevOps teams already use chat tools extensively to work more efficiently and bring together distributed teams. The new plugin for XL Deploy facilitates communication and increases productivity by letting teams monitor deployment activity, trigger deployments and troubleshoot incidents from inside their chat tool of choice, such as HipChat or Slack.