Get to know the HCL Accelerate Community Edition

The team at HCLSoftware DevOps is excited to offer a free version of our value stream management tool – HCL Accelerate Community Edition.

HCL Accelerate Community Edition comes with two concurrent user seats and is great for “two-pizza development teams.” Community Edition has all the same value stream management, release orchestration, and analytics capabilities as Standard Edition, but is best for small teams. You can get started using HCL Accelerate Community Edition right away by going to hclsw.co/getaccelerate.

Community Edition is a great way to get started with value stream management, but we recommend HCL Accelerate Standard Edition for enterprise-level organizations. Community Edition cannot scale across teams, but you can upgrade an individual instance of Community Edition to Standard Edition once you’re ready to expand your HCL Accelerate usage. When you upgrade, all your data and configurations will be saved and transferred to Standard Edition, so there’s nothing to lose by trying Community Edition first. If you already know you’ll need more than two users for HCL Accelerate, you can get started right away with the Standard Edition via our 60-day free trial here. After your 60-day trial ends, your Standard Edition of HCL Accelerate will become Community Edition, unless you contact us to purchase the Standard Edition.

You can find lots of information on our HCL Accelerate “get started” page, but here are some other frequently asked questions about our Community Edition.

Get Started options with HCL Accelerate

What are the system requirements for Community Edition?

4 CPU Cores and 8 GBs of RAM is the recommended minimum for Docker Compose installs. Linux, MacOs, and Windows OS are supported. However, the OS support is based on the Docker Platform of your choosing. Since the CE and SE features set are the same, so are their system requirements.

If you are looking to configure HCL Accelerate for production however, please follow the recommended system requirements on our documentation. Note: We do not support Docker Compose for production usage.

Are there any sample or template value streams I can follow?

Our documentation also has a ton of examples on how to construct your value stream to including link rules, metrics, stages, etc.

What is the difference between an HCL Accelerate plugin and an integration?

Like the other HCLSoftware DevOps products, HCL Accelerate supports a growing set of plugins. In HCL Accelerate, an integration is the instantiation of the plugin itself. Since you might have multiple configuration of a plugin (such as the JIRA plugin configured for different projects or servers), we want to be able to specify a distinction.

Where can I download HCL Accelerate plugins?

One of the great things about HCL Accelerate is that plugin framework handles the management of plugins. HCL Accelerate plugins are hosted as Docker images in our Docker registry and pulled automatically during install and upgrade. Once installed locally, HCL Accelerate will pull from its internal registry for faster integration runtimes.

If your network team prevents downloads from our public Docker registry, you can configure HCL Accelerate to pull from a known custom registry located behind your firewall.

How do I connect a configured HCL Accelerate integration to my value stream?

Every value stream is composed of the data from your configured integrations, such as JIRA or GitHub. Today, those integrations must be configured inside the VSM json.

For example, add this snippet to the integrations section of your VSM JSON to assigned two configured integrations:

“integrations”:

{

“name”: “my-bitbucket-integration”

},

{

“name”: “my-github-integration”

},

Once imported, HCL Accelerate will automatically grab the values from the integration configured in the settings. If you export the VSM JSON, you’ll see there will more configuration values below your newly mapped integrations.

If you prefer to create a new integration via the VSM JSON, you can supply all plugin configuration values as well. Please refer to the plugin documentation as each plugin requires different values for configuration.

Can I get one-on-one help with setting up HCL Accelerate?

Yes! Fill out the form on this page and we’ll set up a time to guide you through setting up HCL Accelerate.