What’s New for Embedded Cluster
Announcing the 2.0 release of Embedded Cluster. The 2.0 release brings improvements to architecture that will help increase the reliability and stability of Embedded Cluster. In particular, vendors and end customers will see significant improvements to the success rate for upgrades of infrastructure Helm charts (such as OpenEBS, the KOTS Admin Console, and vendor-supplied Helm extensions). Release notes.
Simplified the way vendors configure disaster recovery (Embedded Cluster 1.22.0). Rather than having to apply specific labels to all the resources to back up, vendors now have full control over how their application is backed up and restored. Specifically, Velero Backup and Restore resources configured in the release are used to back up and restore the application separately from the Embedded Cluster infrastructure. Docs.
Ensure users see preflights failures, even if they ignore them (Embedded Cluster 1.21.0). The [.inline]--skip-host-preflights[.inline] flag is deprecated in favor of [.inline]--ignore-host-preflights[.inline]. When [.inline]--ignore-host-preflights[.inline] is passed, the Embedded Cluster host preflights are still executed, but the user is prompted and can choose to continue if failures occur. This new behavior ensures that users see any incompatibilities in their environment, while still enabling them to bypass failures if necessary. Note that [.inline]--skip-host-preflights[.inline] will be removed in a future release.
New [.inline]--yes[.inline] flag replaces [.inline]--no-prompt[.inline] (Embedded Cluster 1.21.0). The [.inline]--no-prompt[.inline] flag is deprecated in favor of [.inline]--yes[.inline]. The [.inline]--yes[.inline] flag helps to ensure automation works as expected by providing a way to respond to a prompt in the affirmative, rather than just accepting the default response to any prompt. Note that [.inline]--no-prompt[.inline] will be removed in a future release.
Added several new Embedded Cluster preflights checks. Various new preflight checks were added to help improve the installation success rate for Embedded Cluster users, including checks to ensure that a node’s IP doesn’t conflict with the IP address range Kubernetes will use (2.1.0), SELinux is not in enforcing mode (2.1.0), nodes joining the cluster can communicate with all other nodes in the cluster on ports 6443, 9443, 2380, and 10250 (1.21.0), and more.
What’s New for the Vendor Portal
Enable and disable supported install types for each customer. You can control which installation methods are available to each of your customers by enabling or disabling Install types fields in the customer's license. Setting the supported installation types on a per-customer basis gives you greater control over the installation method used by each customer. It also allows you to provide a more curated Download Portal experience, in that customers will only see the installation assets and instructions that are relevant to them. Docs.
Single Tenant Vendor Managed license type now available for all licenses. All vendors can now create licenses with the Single Tenant Vendor Managed type. This license type is useful for customers where your team is operating the application in infrastructure that you fully control and operate. Docs.
View supported installation types for a release on the channel’s Release History page. Vendors can now easily see which of their releases have support for each install type (KOTS existing cluster, kURL, Embedded Cluster, and Helm) from the Release History page for a given channel.
License policy controls for built-in license fields. The License Fields page in the Vendor Portal is updated to give vendors greater control over the built-in fields that are included in all licenses. First, vendors can set initial values for the built-in license fields, allowing these fields to be pre-configured for all new customers created. We’ve also introduced the ability to lock certain license fields. Locked fields require an extra step to unlock and change, which can be useful for indicating fields that should be changed cautiously. Docs.
Download Embedded Cluster assets without running a curl command. End customers who can't use curl now have the option to download the Embedded Cluster installer to their workstation from the Download Portal UI with a click.
What’s New for Product Documentation
New topic on the Helm [.inline]global.replicated[.inline] values schema. The Helm install section of the docs is updated with a new page that provides detail on the values that are injected into the values file of a Helm chart by the Replicated registry during Helm installations. This update adds a description of each field and also differentiates between the [.inline] global.replicated [.inline] values and the [.inline]replicated[.inline] values associated with the Replicated SDK. Docs.
New topic on updating TLS certificates in Embedded Cluster installations. A new page was added to the Embedded Cluster section of the docs with steps on how to update custom TLS certs for Embedded Cluster installations. Docs.
New topic on how to access and pull team usage history for Compatibility Matrix. As part of the recent improvements to the Compatibility Matrix Usage History page and the [.inline]history[.inline] API endpoint, we’ve added a new docs page that helps a vendor understand how they can get this information programmatically or within the product UI. Docs.
New topic on how to proxy public images. A new page was added to the docs site that describes how to pull images from public registries using the Replicated proxy registry, allowing vendors to simplify network access requirements by requiring that only a single domain is whitelisted (either [.inline]proxy.replicated.com[.inline] or your custom domain). Docs.