A key component to a successful DevOps initiative is having centralized management and consistent versioning of all artifacts in a repository, which provides a single source of truth.
Most DevOps teams don’t want to depend on file systems or non-standard artifact repositories anymore, where they cannot rely on the consistency and versioning of their binaries. JFrog Artifactory is a universal artifact manager that provides a singles source of truth for all your build artifacts - enabling you to ship updates continuously and automatically, ensuring that your release always uses the most recent version of the artifact.
Storing build artifacts in a repository is important, but it only solves one piece of the problem for DevOps teams. These artifacts are components of larger applications or services. Various teams need to deploy these artifacts with their dependencies, across one or multiple environments throughout all stages of the pipeline - in a repeatable and reliable way.
With CloudBees Flow, teams can model their applications - which consist of multiple artifacts - and the dependencies between them, as well as the release pipelines delivering these applications from development to Production.
CloudBees Flow and Artifactory Plugin Capabilities:
The new plugin integration between CloudBees Flow and Artifactory makes it easy to model applications in CloudBees Flow referencing artifacts stored in Artifactory, with support for numerous repository layouts.
When a request for deployment is made in CloudBees Flow, the platform seamlessly retrieves the relevant artifacts from Artifactory as part of the deploy process. Users have the flexibility to reference specific versions in Artifactory, configure the deployment to always pick up the latest version, or even dynamically determine which versions to deploy at runtime. This flexibility enables different use cases, such as using the ‘latest’ version to schedule automatic deployments of nightly build outputs to QA environments every morning.
Artifactory versioning enables key capabilities in CloudBees Flow:
In CloudBees Flow, versions are stored in Environment Inventory, recording the exact versions of each artifact that has been deployed to an environment, so you could easily track and audit what is deployed where. The SmartDeploy feature in CloudBees Flow compares that inventory with the artifact versions being deployed, and only deploys any new artifact versions to that specific environment for efficient and safe deployments. CloudBees Flow automatically captures a version of the entire application, including individual artifact versions pulled from Artifactory, in a Snapshot. Using a snapshot in deployments guarantees consistency across environments- so you could have the same components and configuration in the lower environment, as well as in Production.
These tight integrations of Artifactory versions feeding into model-driven processes and capabilities in CloudBees Flow provide visibility, reliable deployments and ensure repeatability and fidelity across all the environments and processes throughout the pipeline. This ensures that teams can deploy to production with confidence.
Both CloudBees Flow and Artifactory solutions are equipped for enterprise use, with the combination supporting business critical releases of any size and scale.
Check out the new Artifactory plugin for CloudBees Flow here .
Download the free Community Edition below to try the new integration for yourself.