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What's New for the Vendor Portal
See your total egress and get alerted when it spikes - Vendors have always been able to see detailed logs of who pulled what through the proxy registry. New this month is a view of your total monthly egress, along with the ability to set a threshold notification that alerts you when pull volume runs ahead of your expected pattern.
Drop static registry credentials with IAM and OIDC auth - The proxy registry now supports IAM and OIDC authentication for upstream registries such as Amazon ECR. Instead of managing and rotating long-lived static credentials, vendors can authenticate with short-lived cloud identity.
Custom Metrics is now generally available - Custom Metrics has graduated from Beta. Vendors can leverage custom metrics to build reporting and alerting on business-level signals from customer instances, not just infrastructure health.
What's New for Embedded Cluster
Manage the cluster from a browser with the persistent admin console - Embedded Cluster v3 introduces an optional persistent admin console that stays running on the cluster, so end customers can operate their deployment from a browser instead of returning to SSH and the CLI for every task. This directly lowers the operational burden for enterprises with limited SSH access permissions. The console now supports:
- Browser-driven upgrades, including retrying the current version
- Airgap installs and upgrades, with releases uploaded through the dashboard and applied without SSH access
- Support bundle generation from the console UI
- Sending support bundles to the vendor, now generally available, uploaded straight from the console through the Replicated SDK
Kubernetes 1.36 support and the move to containerd 2.x - Both Embedded Cluster v2 and v3 now support Kubernetes 1.36. The notable part is what comes with it. Upstream k0s moves to containerd 2.x at this version, so Embedded Cluster is now on the containerd 2.x line.
External preflight specs rendered through Helm (v3 only) - In Embedded Cluster v3, external application preflight specs are now rendered through Helm on a per-chart basis. Vendors can package environment checks outside a chart and still have them resolve that chart's values, helpers, and defaults, so real misconfigurations get caught before an install proceeds rather than after it fails.
Taints on custom node roles (v3 only) - Embedded Cluster v3 lets vendor-defined custom node roles carry taints in addition to labels. Vendors can reserve specific nodes for specific workloads, such as GPU or memory-heavy components, giving customers predictable scheduling without hand-tuning the cluster.
Bring your own registry for installs and upgrades (v3 only) - Embedded Cluster v3 supports using your own registry for both initial installs and upgrades. Customers can now switch to a different registry during an upgrade, so those who adopt or change a private registry after they are already running are no longer locked into the choice they made on day one.
What's New for KOTS
Snapshots keep working on modern Velero, now with Kopia - Starting in KOTS v1.130.7, KOTS is aware of the installed Velero version and configures snapshots accordingly. Velero 1.17 deprecated Restic and made Kopia the default file-system uploader, and KOTS now emits the correct configuration for both the Restic era and the Kopia era, with in-console guidance for migrating storage where needed.
What's New for the Compatibility Matrix
VMs and airgap environments are now generally available - Two Compatibility Matrix capabilities reached general availability this month. Creating virtual machines and creating airgapped environments allow vendors to define more realistic end customer representative testing environments, including fully offline ones, into standard CI instead of maintaining that infrastructure themselves.
Documentation Updates
- What context the SDK has per install method. A new table shows exactly what the Replicated SDK can report in each install method, so vendors know what to expect before they build against it.
- How registry authentication works per install method. New guidance clears up a frequent point of confusion by spelling out how registry auth differs across Helm, KOTS, and Embedded Cluster.