OES 3.5 is Generally Available with Kubernetes Anywhere, Informed Approval and More

With the pandemic year hopefully behind us, we are excited to welcome 2021 with our new release OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker 3.5, which extends our leadership in intelligent continuous delivery platforms.  2020 was an incredible year for OpsMx –  we added a record number of customers to the OpsMx family. Our customers further validate that enterprises believe in our vision of software delivery without human intervention. 

The 3.5 software release of OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker (OES) introduces several key enhancements that will provide tremendous benefit to any Spinnaker continuous delivery user.  If you are an Open Source Spinnaker user, our OES 3.5 release will work seamlessly with your deployments. 

List of new and improved features in the OES 3.5 Release

Introduction of OES Anywhere agent to deploy into multiple security domain

Using open-source Spinnaker, you would realize that it doesn’t support app deployments into other security domains. First, if the Spinnaker is hosted in the cloud, deploying into the on-prem data center is an issue. Second, when Spinnaker is used as a shared-service to deploy into multiple security domains- new k8s clusters in a secure environment- control of credentials is an issue. 

To tackle the challenges above, OES 3.5 brings OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker Anywhere agent. You can deploy OES Anywhere agents in target Kubernetes clusters, and the proxy agents establish a secure connection to the Spinnaker services in the separate security domain. Each target Kubernetes cluster dynamically self-registers with the Spinnaker services, creating an out-bound relationship to Spinnaker that satisfies security requirements. 

With OES Anywhere agent, enterprises can consistently deploy into Kubernetes in VPC or private cloud and adopt a centralized Spinnaker-as-a-Service for organization-wide teams.

For more detailed information, see the blog that describes the how to deploy anywhere using OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker Anywhere agent.

Kubernetes Anywhere Solution for Spinnaker

Informed Approval is now GA

One of the exciting features we introduced in the OES 3.0 release was the informed approval gate.
The gate provides all relevant information about a release to a reviewer or approver for making informed decisions for promoting release from dev to QA, QA to staging, and staging to production.

The informed approval feature in the OES 3.5 release provides the following options.

• Enable multiple approval gates, which allows approval decisions for the entire dev-prod workflow.
• Visibility and data aggregated from all relevant sources such as
  • Source code repository- Git
  • Source code analysis – Sonarqube
  • Governance  – Jira
  • Build – Jenkins
  • Verification – OpsMx Autopilot
  • Security – AquaSec
• Easily add one or more gates to the Spinnaker pipeline with one click.

Informed approval gates feature in the OES 3.5 release

Application Dashboard is now GA

Another exciting new feature in the OES 3.5 is the Application Dashboard, which syncs with Spinnaker in the backend and provides a useful dashboard that provides important information like whether there are any pending approvals, or policy violations,  verification failures.   The dashboard also provides a quick way to navigate to the approval, verification, and policy gates enabled for each service.

Application Dashboard is now GA in the OES 3.5 release

Support for Splunk and AWS CoudWatch Logs in Automated Continuous Verification

OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker extends its industry-leading automated release verification with support for Splunk and AWS CloudWatch logs as part of expanding monitoring tools support.  OES continuous verification intelligently analyzes risk based on logs, metrics, and other data sources during release. In addition to the newly supported logs, OES also supports AppDynamics, Datadog, Graphite, New Relic, Prometheus, Stackdriver, Elasticsearch, and Sumo Logic for metrics and logs data, and we continue to add new sources to further integrate into the products in your DevOps toolchain.

Supports Splunk

Supports Amazon CloudWatch

OpsMx Autopilot, a module of OpsMx Enterprise for Spinnaker, is an ML-based system for automating verification and approvals, continuous verification, and increased visibility and insights. Autopilot considers all the sources mentioned above to automatically calculate the risk of moving an update forward in the pipeline. For an introduction to Autopilot, see the blog Use OpsMx Autopilot to Accelerate your CI/CD pipeline.

Improved Delivery Dashboard

Do you ever wonder how many deployments are happening in your organization and the most active or failing services?  With the improved delivery dashboard, you will have all the answers at the tip of your fingertips with a beautiful, customizable dashboard.  The Delivery Dashboard displays all the statistics from the Spinnaker continuous delivery platform.

Improved Delivery Dashboard

Improved Audit Trail and Policy Management

One of the critical requirements for any CSO or security administrator is auditing all events in the continuous delivery process, such as who deployed what updates at which times.  Also, information such as who approved the updates or modified the pipelines, etc., is critical. With our new, improved audit trail feature in 3.5, you can audit the pipeline runs and pipeline modifications.

Improved Audit Trail 

Another aspect of security is the need to enforce both regulatory and enterprise policy before a violation occurs. With the new, improved interface for adding and editing OPA based policy, you can enable policy gate anywhere in the pipeline.  All the policy events are audited, and notifications are sent for violations. 

Improved Policy Management

We are looking for feedback from the community and customers on these features, and also, if you are interested in signing to be a free preview beta user for future releases, please reach out at hello@opsmx.io. If you’d like to see a demo, please email, or schedule a meeting directly, or ping us online from our homepage.

I am looking forward to catching up with you on more new blockbuster features in our upcoming 3.6 release. Stay tuned.

For more information on the release including information on corrected issues, please see the OES 3.5 Release Notes.

If you want to know about corrections to previous issues, please refer to the release notes.

If you want to learn more about OES 3.5 or request a demo, please book a meeting with us. You can also simply get a free trial to explore the power of OES.

OpsMx is a leading provider of Continuous Delivery platform that helps enterprises safely deliver software at scale and without any human intervention. We help engineering teams take the risk and manual effort out of releasing innovations at the speed of modern business. For additional information, contact us.