Rocket DevOps (formerly Aldon)

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September 2020 Aldon DevOps Suite Releases Are Now Available

  • 1.  September 2020 Aldon DevOps Suite Releases Are Now Available

    Posted 10-05-2020 14:40
    Edited by Steve Wright 10-07-2020 14:28
    The September releases of Aldon begin a new chapter in the Rocket DevOps journey. The entire primary suite of products, including LM(i), LM(e), Reports Manager, and Ops Portal, have been upgraded to work with some of the latest features of IBM i and provide the functionality the development community is clamoring for – including a tighter integration with Git. Some of the enhancements also provide insight as to where Rocket is going next with its DevOps product as we expand our ability to integrate with the tools that every development team already utilizes – while continuing to provide the process control and audit overview that is the Aldon trademark. And we're doing this while expanding our web UI access and functionality and giving new abilities to shops developing a mix of IBM i and Enterprise applications.

    Some of the most exciting new features are housed in the Ops Portal, which is becoming a tool to manage all levels of development. Changes have been made to improve integrations with Legasuite and Rocket API and handle more duties for administering LM(i) and LM(e). This includes a consolidated task view, where an LM(i) task can be related to an LM(e) task, and the LM(i) task will be promoted automatically – and promotions can now be made from the Dev environment all the way through production. After deployment, specific parts can be searched for and included on the installation report. New tasks can also be created for either product rather than having to use the LM(e) client or the LM(i) green screen (though the created tasks appear in both). And the RESTful API has been enhanced to support queries of environment/group/application/release/tasks and trigger the task creation/promotion/deployment.

    With LM(i) 8.5 developers can seamlessly work with "Temporal Tables" which maintain a history of data changes. Once created and identified LM(i) will check-out/promote/manage the temporal table pairs as a set, keeping them properly synced at all levels of development. Developers can also properly promote and deploy an IBM Validation List (VLDL) with stored user ID and password information for remote users within their projects, deploying it as easily as they do the rest of their application. Sites using the 2E Link can now have multiple tasks promoted in one job.

    LM(e), depending on whether you have the IBM i or Linux version, has new abilities as well. The IBM037 character set is now the default for deployments on IBM i. Red Hat and CentOS Linux versions 8.1 and 8.2 are supported, and the Apache Tomcat version in the Security Server has been upgraded to 8.5. There are also new reports in the Ops Portal for deployment verifications – helping to verify a successful deployment. And perhaps most helpful to much of our user base is a more complete integration with Git. With Git LM(e) now supports real deletion and synchronization globally, with bi-directional triggering of the build and deployment process.

    Report Manager now includes Windows Active Directory (AD) authentication activated by default, including authentication based on AD Group. Performance of RM has been improved for faster response times.

    For greater compatibility with a global user base, Ops Portal can now be configured to display LM(i) task and group/application/release descriptions in English, French, German, Greek, Italian or Spanish (DBCS language support, which will include support for Asian languages, is intended for inclusion in a future version).

    The future of the Rocket DevOps suite will include greater compatibility with more languages and more functionality via a modern web-based interface – but without losing the speed and convenience of our current user interfaces. As well as whatever enhancements our customers and the development community in general require. We are always looking for input on where to go next and ways to communicate with our customers, and this forum is one good means of delivering feedback while connecting with other product users and Rocketeers.

    Thank you!

    Releases include:

    Rocket Aldon LM(i) 8.5
    Rocket Aldon LM(e) 6.7
    Rocket Aldon Reports Manager 1.8.1
    Rocket Aldon Ops Portal 3.5
    Eclipse Plugin 8.2.500 Win / Mac
    Jenkins 2.0

    #LMi #LMe #DevOps #Aldon

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