Introducing HCL Launch

I’m thrilled to introduce HCL Launch, our deploy anything, anywhere solution. This continuous delivery piece of the HCLSoftware DevOps portfolio can provide value for your DevOps transformation regardless of the maturity of your ecosystem. 

HCL Launch is a tool for automating application deployments through your environments. It is designed to facilitate rapid feedback and continuous delivery in agile development while providing the audit trails, versioning, and approvals needed in production. Launch allows for easy automation of complex deployment scenarios and provides the tools to enforce governance as your application progresses from development to production environments. Plus, Launch’s 100+ plugins make interacting with all platforms in your DevOps toolchain easier than ever.

The latest release of HCL Launch, version 7.1.0.0, includes exciting new features tailored to help you modernize your continuous delivery with features that facilitate automation of deployments to development environments and allow deployments to first reach out to your change management systems to determine if they should proceed. This update expands our support of enterprise-grade needs so you can architect for the future and continue your digital transformation journey.

External Approvals

New in HCL Launch 7.1, External Approvals Processes allow plugin steps to be used. These approval processes will run immediately before a deployment and their success or failure will determine if the proceeding deployment is permitted to execute. This allows for highly extensible approval processes that use integrations for change management systems to validate that the change request paired with a deployment is in the valid state.  

Deployment Triggers

Deployment Triggers are ways for HCL Launch environments to subscribe to certain components. A trigger consists of a specified component, deployment process, and user. Whenever a component finishes importing a version, the Launch server will automatically execute all deployment triggers relevant to that component and will run configured deployment processes against the triggers’ environment, using the newly imported version as the deployment payload. With deployment triggers, development environments can be configured to get the latest build artifacts deployed as soon as they are received by the Launch server. 

Server Cluster Improvements

HCL Launch 7.1 includes several quality–of–life improvements for High-Availability configurations. Server–to–Server communication now takes advantage of the robust websocket communication introduced to agents in v7.0. The server’s Network page will also now display connectivity information about your server cluster to easily diagnose problems.  

Improved User Experience:

There are several changes to the HCL Launch UI that will make your life easier. We rebuilt the Resource Tree page from the ground up to greatly improve the performance of the page when viewing very large resource trees. 

Deployment requests are now submitted via a new page that better organizes and displays information required for that deployment. 

The application environment list has been redesigned to modernize the UI styling and present environment and inventory information in a more understandable way 

Merging zOS versions

Customers taking advantage of HCL Launch’s capability to deploy to zOS mainframe systems will be delighted to learn that incremental zOS component versions can be merged down into a single version that consolidates all version artifacts into a single set of the most recent files across all versions merged. This allows large sets of component versions to be converted into a single, more manageable version. 

See HCL Launch in action 

I recorded a webinar where you can learn more about HCL Launch and see the new features we’ve added. Head here to watch the demo on demand.