New year, same great product innovation from Replicated! We’ve spent the month enhancing how you can log in to Replicated, adding a new Docker Hub-specific registry walkthrough flow, and making it possible to customize your Kubernetes installer host preflights. Read on for the detail on these exciting updates to our application manager (a/k/a “KOTS” (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf), our Kubernetes installer (a/k/a “kURL”), and the vendor portal. Check out the recently shipped features and release highlights for January 2022 below.
New Release Highlights:
What’s New for the vendor portal:
- Vendor portal: Added Google Authentication Login to Vendor Portal
- Vendor portal: New Docker Hub Specific ‘Add Registry’ Option and Improved Error Descriptions
What’s New for the application manager:
- Application manager: Rollout of Redesigned Admin Console UI/UX
What’s New for the Kubernetes installer:
- Kubernetes installer: Host Preflights Are Now Fully Customizable
- Kubernetes installer: Support For Kubernetes 1.22 And The Latest Patch Versions
What’s New for the vendor portal:
Vendor portal: Added Google Authentication Login to Vendor Portal
New and existing Replicated users now have the ability to sign in to their Replicated.com vendor portal accounts using Google Authentication. This method of primary authentication is available to all accounts as an alternative to email/password-based authentication and SAML authentication (Enterprise accounts only).
We were particularly excited about this feature, so we detailed it separately in this blog post. Sign in or create an account to try out this new authentication method!
Vendor portal: New Docker Hub Specific ‘Add Registry’ Option and Improved Error Descriptions
For those using Docker Hub, our team has taken some of the guesswork out of adding your registry in vendor portal for your app’s images. Now when adding your Docker Hub registry, you can select Docker Hub and simply provide valid credentials. You can see a brief demo of this in the gif below.
In addition, our team has improved some of the basic error handling for the ‘Add Registry’ workflows. In particular, in several scenarios, an unhelpful and generic ‘status code 500’ error would display. Now the error will provide more information so that it is a bit more clear on the cause of the potential issue.
What’s New for the application manager
Application manager: Rollout of Redesigned Admin Console UI/UX
Another feature improvement with particular enthusiasm is the exciting redesign of the admin console app dashboard and version history pages! We announced this update in more detail in this blog post, but we’ll do the ‘TL;DR; right here ICYMI.
Both pages received extensive aesthetic improvements, and the app dashboard page was completely updated to make key capabilities easier to access. For example, you can now view and sync your license, see the configured snapshot storage destination, take a snapshot, configure automatic updates, and more, without ever leaving the app dashboard.
This change is included in app manager version 1.60.0+ and is controlled by a feature flag that is enabled for all teams by default. If you would like to temporarily opt-out of this change, get in touch with your customer success manager. However, opting out is only temporary since the feature flag will be removed in the near future and the new experience will become standard for all versions 1.60.0+. Please pass any feedback on the new experience to your customer success manager if you have any feedback!
What’s New for the Kubernetes installer
Kubernetes installer: Host Preflights Are Now Fully Customizable and Blocking
We first introduced host preflights in the Kubernetes installer to ensure that target environments met the requirements for installing Kubernetes and other add-ons included in the installer spec. Customers quickly provided feedback that they wanted to customize host preflights to fit their needs, too. For example, some customers wanted to support a more limited set of operating systems. Others wanted to run some of their app preflights earlier in the installation process, rather than waiting until Kubernetes and the app manager were installed before signaling a failure.
This month we introduced a couple of new capabilities to allow vendors to customize host preflights. Specifically, custom host preflights can be added to the Kubernetes installer spec and will run in addition to the default host preflights, and the `excludeBuiltinHostPreflights` flag is now available in the kURL add-on to disable the default host preflights from running at all. Combined, these two capabilities allow you to run custom host preflights in addition to the defaults, or disable the defaults and run a custom suite of host preflights instead. We provide links to the YAML for our default host preflights so that it’s easy to recreate the defaults and make the tweaks you need.
Finally, we also made host preflight failures block an installation or upgrade from proceeding. This makes failures more obvious than they were previously, and it ensures that failures are addressed in order to increase the likelihood of successful installations and ongoing operations. Further customization is available with the `host-preflight-ignore` and `host-preflight-enforce-warnings flags`, which, respectively, prevent failures from blocking and cause both errors and warnings to block.
If the default host preflights start blocking and are not quite right for your use case, view our documentation on customizing host preflights in order to get them just right. If you’re not yet pinning a version of the Kubernetes installer, consider adding that to your installer spec, too, so that you can roll this change out to your customers on your timeline.
Kubernetes installer: Support For Kubernetes 1.22, 1.23, And The Latest Patch Versions
In January we updated the Kubernetes installer to support Kubernetes 1.22 and 1.23, as well as the latest patch versions for versions 1.19, 1.20, and 1.21. Moving forward, we are committed to supporting new Kubernetes versions within one month of their upstream release.
If you’re installing using the embedded cluster option, update your installer to use Kubernetes 1.22.x or 1.23.x today. No matter which version you are using, consider pinning the major and minor version only, using the .x patch release notation, in order to continue getting patch releases without needing to update your installer spec.
That’s it for the January release highlights! Want to learn more about these new features and what Replicated does to help vendors and customers install and manage modern apps on-prem? We would love to show you -- click here to schedule a demo.