Blog

Product & Engineering

How Replicated uses the Compatibility Matrix to continuously test our KOTS installer releases on various K8s distributions and versions

Now with Replicated’s new Compatibility Matrix offering, we are able to confidently test KOTS compatibility, and the new Replicated SDK offering, on OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, and more. KOTS testing continues to benefit with each new distribution and version added.

Product & Engineering

Announcing: Custom Metrics for Instance Insights

Announcing a new way to use Instance Insights: Custom Metrics. Beyond just instance uptime, app versions, and infrastructure status, vendors can now measure *anything they want* about customer instances.

Deploying your app for customers doesn’t have to hurt so much

There’s nothing like a good first impression, but most ISVs offer nothing like a good first impression of their app when installing into customer-managed environments. This blog will explore the pain of non-SaaS software installation and updates, and suggest some strategies to improve the experience for both vendors and their customers.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights - October 2023

Read all about improvements to Compatibility Matrix, Vendor Portal, our SDK, KOTS, kURL, and docs. Check out the release highlights for October 2023.

How to Better Support your App Efficiently in Customer-managed Environments

Research shows that vendors need to make improvements around support efficiency and keeping customers on more recent versions of their apps. Both these factors should contribute to better customer satisfaction (CSAT) and improved net promoter scores (NPS).

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights: September 2023

Read all about improvements to Compatibility Matrix, Vendor Portal, our SDK, KOTS, kURL, and docs. Check out the release highlights for September 2023.

Product & Engineering

Announcing: Vendor Portal Improvements for Helm Installations

Today, Replicated is announcing additional features to complement the recent beta launch of the Replicated SDK for Helm Charts, making it easier for vendors to experiment with Helm CLI installations.

Product & Engineering

Introducing the Replicated SDK (beta)

We're pleased to announce the beta availability of the Replicated SDK for all vendors using the Replicated platform. The Replicated SDK is a new feature that's been designed to make Helm CLI based installations more transparent and manageable.

Product & Engineering

Revolutionizing Vulnerability Management with VEX

Learn how VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) revolutionizes vulnerability management, and how Replicated is leveraging it to offer a standardized and automated approach to efficiently address vulnerabilities.

Product & Engineering

ISV Testing Strategies for Reliability and Compatibility

ISVs should be able to test a release prior to distributing to end-customers. Tests will cascade from quick and simple tests that can be done at every app code commit, to more time consuming complex tests that are run in preparation for a full customer-facing release.

Product & Engineering

Why ISV software distribution teams are overworked (and what to do about it)

Teams responsible for the distribution of their software into customer environments overworked and underfunded. We dig into some of the common reasons and look at ways to address this challenge.

Product & Engineering

All K8s are not the same: How ISVs test compatibility

When distributing a Helm chart to hundreds of enterprise customers, it's important for ISVs to ensure compatibility with a range of Kubernetes versions, distributions, configurations, add-ons, and entitlement. Here's how.

Product & Engineering

Using Security as a Catalyst to Improve Application Adoption Metrics

Replicated recently announced new version adoption reporting. If your software adoption metrics signal challenges with your enterprise customers taking on recent software updates, consider using security as an enabler.

Product & Engineering

Announcing: Adoption Reporting

Today, we’re thrilled to be launching some brand-new adoption reporting in the Replicated Vendor portal. Replicated customers can now see key version adoption data rolled up across all their customers. This adoption report will provide not only at-a-glance tactical and operational details, but also key strategic metrics for understanding and improving the quality of the software you distribute.

Product & Engineering

Announcing: Regex Config Input Validation

Now in version KOTS 1.98.0+ you can define guardrails using regular expressions to ensure values provided by an end user are valid.

Product & Engineering

Secure Everything Everywhere All at Once

Security requires a comprehensive approach to be successful, and Replicated helps security-conscious vendors and enterprises meet their goals. We can think of 1/ security strategy for the enterprise who wants control of their data and the apps they use, 2/ security approaches used by the vendor building the app, and 3/ security by design that’s embedded within Replicated to facilitate both. This blog will explore the many layers of security that are necessary to protect apps and data in customer-controlled environments – everything, everywhere, all at once.

Product & Engineering

Measuring up: The Existential Crisis for Commercial Software Distribution

Independent software vendors (ISVs) need to urgently rethink how they distribute their applications to their customers' self-managed environments (i.e. on-premises, VPC, or air-gapped environments). Without more useful metrics to give them insights to their actual holistic performance, they have hidden problems they can't quantify or address, which threaten their success.

Product & Engineering

Instance Insights: Install Success Rate

Surveying your install success rate gives you insight into the quality of the packaging of your software and how prepared you and your customers are to begin the install. How many attempts does it take before an install is successful? What percentage of installs require more than one attempt? How often are installs successful on the first attempt?

Product & Engineering

Allow Users From Your Company to Auto-Join Your Replicated Team!

We’ve enhanced the experience of onboarding new vendor users by allowing users with a matching email address domain to automatically join your team. It’s no longer necessary to send invites to each user within your organization if you want to allow read-only access to all employees for that specific team.

Product & Engineering

Instance Insights: Time to Install

The first metric we’ll dive into in the Instance Insights series is time to install. The time it takes for end users to get a vendor’s software up and running in a new environment is a key indicator of the quality of the packaging, configuration, testing, and documentation of the delivery of a software product.

Product & Engineering

How the GitLab Team Made Software Distribution a Core Product Competency

At RepliCon Q4 2022, one of Replicated’s Senior Product Managers, Dex Horthy, sat down with Dilan Orrino, DJ Mountney, and Jason Plum from GitLab and chatted about how their team things of excellence in software distribution.

Product & Engineering

Introducing Replicated Instance Insights: Key Metrics for Customer-Hosted Applications

This is the first article of a series in which we'll dive into using strategic metrics to drive excellence in commercial off-the-shelf software. It's important to align on what to measure and how before launching any customer-hosted or on-prem initiative.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights: January 2023

Check out the recently shipped Replicated features and release highlights for January 2023.

Product & Engineering

Rapid release iteration with Replicated and Tilt

We describe how to setup an inner loop development cycle with Application Manager (KOTS) and use Tilt to automate that inner loop for truly rapid release iteration.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Completes SOC 2 Type 2 Audit

Replicated today announced the successful completion of our System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 2 attestation for security and confidentiality. This achievement reflects the company’s commitment to cybersecurity.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights: November 2022

November brought with it shorter days and longer nights, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams were undeterred preparing a feast of new features. See the latest new Replicated features in this edition of Recent Release Highlights!

Product & Engineering

Pinning Your kURL Installer for Greater Consistency

Your kURL installer specification allows you to specify what components (add-ons) you want in your embedded K8s cluster. Those component versions can be pinned, which helps get everyone running the same versions.

Product & Engineering

When to Choose Self-managed vs SaaS for Your Applications

We believe there is a place for SaaS software, and it is important to understand how the decision between the self-managed vs SaaS is made. This post explains the two primary axes of the decision.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights: October 2022

As the leaves drop, so do the new features. Check out all of the latest features that landed in October

Product & Engineering

Enhancing the Replicated App Manager with Rqlite

Starting in v1.89.0, the app manager uses rqlite instead of Postgres to store metadata like version information. This change is the first step toward a more highly available and more supportable app manager.

Product & Engineering

Debugging Kubernetes: Enhancements to Troubleshoot

We're happy to announce some new updates for the Troubleshoot project to help make debugging K8s applications more modular and dynamic, including online specs.

Product & Engineering

Enhanced Helm is Now Open for Public Beta

Our enhanced Helm offering has progressed to an “open beta” stage. This means both vendors currently using Replicated and the general public are now eligible to apply to join our beta program.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights: Sept 2022

Spring and summer gave autumn a miss, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams are charging ahead on our product roadmap! Check out all the new stuff in this recap.

Research report: Customer Demand Drives On-premises Software Growth

Perhaps surprising to prevailing wisdom, this year’s report shows just how strong the demand continues to be for on-prem software. Spoiler: this segment is alive and thriving.

Product & Engineering

How to run GPU Workloads on a K8s Cluster with kURL

When using kURL for an on-prem Kubernetes installation, it is possible to enable GPU support with some minor changes in the kURL spec. This blog post will guide you through the different steps needed to enable GPUs.

Product & Engineering

Replicated Recent Release Highlights: August 2022

Summer may be winding down, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams are moving full steam ahead on our product roadmap! It’s time for another fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available.

Product & Engineering

Troubleshoot.sh (A Guide to Debugging Kubernetes)

Replicated sponsors an open source project called Troubleshoot, follow the link for the official troubleshoot.sh page. There are two major sides to Troubleshoot, which are preflight checks and support bundles.

Product & Engineering

How to Run CIS Benchmark Tests on K8s Clusters Installed with kURL

As part of our continuing effort to help vendors ship software securely to their customers, we added a new feature that enables you to create a Kubernetes node that meets CIS benchmark best practices.

A Message from Replicated's CEO

A message from the CEO of Replicated, Grant Miller.

Product & Engineering

How to Use ‘Strict’ Application Preflight Checks to Prevent Unsuccessful Application Installs

This feature enhancement allows you to specify if you want a failed preflight check to block a requested application deployment.

Product & Engineering

Enable Semantic Versioning and Automatically Deploy New Versions

Replicated recently released two great new features that are even more powerful when used together: our new support for semantic versioning and automatically deploying updates.

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