School will start again soon and our Product & Engineering teams are already teaching our software new tricks. It’s time for another fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available in the Replicated platform. Check out the recently shipped features and release highlights for August 2023 below.
What’s New for The Vendor Portal:
Vendor Portal: Instance Notifications - Public Beta
Notifications are a new way to get important updates about your customers’ on-premises instances directly, without having to log into the Vendor Portal. This helps you to identify changes and potential problems early, and maybe even prevent some support issues entirely. You can be notified via Slack or email when customer instances experience degradations or downtime, and respond proactively to fix these issues in the field.
Addressing instances that are “degraded” before they turn into “hard down” helps you improve overall uptime and the general reliability of all instances. Notifications may also reduce the amount of time you need to spend in the Vendor Portal -- rather than checking on customer instances status daily or weekly, you can rest assured that you’ll be notified if a customer installation needs attention. You can even adjust the verbosity from “everything” to “just app status changes”. Check out the documentation today to start building more awareness of what your customers are doing and how your software is performing.
Vendor Portal: The Adoption Graph is now GA
The adoption graph introduced in June is now GA. If you haven’t already, check out our blog post on adoption metrics to start understanding your customer trends better.
Vendor Portal: Improvements for Helm-Installable Releases
We’ve made updates to better help you to prepare and publish releases for end customers who want to install with the Helm CLI. First, there’s a workflow to create a helm-only release. Second, the new “helm install” button enables you to create Helm Install instructions for a customer license. Third, we’ve updated the Replicated linter to be specifically aware of helm-only releases. And finally, licenses can now be configured as “helm-only” by disabling an “Enable KOTS Installs” checkbox. Check out the video below exploring these new features:
Vendor Portal: New Linked Registry Enhancements
We’ve updated the workflow of adding new registries into the Vendor Portal. Now you can immediately test via the GUI that your registry credentials are correct and we provide templates to help you configure the most common registry formats.
What’s New for KOTS (Application Installer):
KOTS: Preflights Can Now Be Bundled In Helm
When you created Preflight checks for Helm charts you previously had to duplicate them for KOTS if you wanted them runnable via Helm CLI and KOTS. This is no longer necessary as KOTS can detect preflight checks within your Helm chart! This also opens up the possibility of using Helm templating for preflights that are running via KOTS. For more information about preflights in Helm charts, see Define Preflight Checks for Helm Installations.
What’s New for Troubleshoot
Troubleshoot: New Detailed Message for Unhealthy Pods (Troubleshoot v0.70.0)
The new “Cluster Pod statuses” analyzer will now show the event message of “unhealthy Pod” and provide a detailed explanation of why the pod is unhealthy. This helps you to identify the root cause of failing pods more easily. Update to the latest version of Troubleshoot to get this enhancement and check out the documentation for more information.
Troubleshoot: New Host Collector and Analyzer chain data of SSL/TLS certificate on the host (Troubleshoot v0.70.0)
This new host collector and analyzer validates multiple certificates from the host and checks the expiration date. This helps you to quickly identify expired certificates as the root cause of failures and preemptively warn about certificates that may soon expire -- and common and frustrating to diagnose condition. Update to the latest Troubleshoot to get this enhancement and start using this new feature to quickly diagnose certificate issues. Check out the documentation for more information.
What’s New for Compatibility Matrix
Compatibility Matrix (BETA): Now Supports OpenShift
You can now test against OpenShift OKD 4.13.0 (k8s v1.26.0) as part of the Compatibility Matrix -- a new beta add-on feature of our platform. OpenShift’s unique security constraints have often been a source of difficulty for vendors to target and test. Now you can test OpenShift with each release or even every commit. Check out the docs on Compatibility Matrix to get started or watch this intro video below to see how it works!
What’s New for Replicated Documentation
Replicated Documentation: Reorganized Navigation
The navigation bar now better separates installation and distribution components. You can now navigate to the section you are interested in more easily to focus on those specific areas you are working on.
That’s it for the August 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.