The holidays have come and gone, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams kept on delivering many new features for our application manager, our Kubernetes installer, and the vendor portal. Check out the recently shipped features and release highlights for January 2023 below.
(A note on this blog: you didn’t miss the December edition, we’ve adjusted our naming convention to indicate the month the blog was published versus the month the new feature work was completed. We’re making it more obvious that you’re reading the latest news! See the previous release highlights here.)
What’s New for the Vendor Portal
Vendor portal: Improvements to vendor portal RBAC user experience
We’ve continued to deliver UX improvements to the RBAC functionality by showing disabled buttons and help text in the UI for users who do not have access to perform the related actions. This should reduce confusion compared to the previous behavior of fully removing buttons and other UI elements when a user couldn’t perform an action.
Vendor portal: Add help text and documentation links in the UI
We’ve added a number of contextual in-app links to documentation We’re empowering users to self-serve their onboarding experience in Replicated and to better get to know the various features and products
What’s New for the Application Manager
Application manager: Preflights and support bundles now run twice as fast (v1.92.1)
With a simple optimization, performance for preflight checks and support bundles – two crucial operations – is now much improved, which speeds up both development and production installations.
Application manager: Template functions for the Kubernetes version, and the major and minor versions (v1.92.0)
Vendors can now use Replicated template functions to dynamically determine the Kubernetes version running in their customers’ environments. This is useful if the app depends on functionality present in a particular Kubernetes version, for example. Learn more in our docs: KubernetesVersion, KubernetesMajorVersion, KubernetesMinorVersion.
Application manager: A custom domain can be used for the Replicated registry and the proxy service (Alpha) (v1.92.0)
If a vendor wants to more fully brand their application, they can create a custom domain for the Replicated registry (registry.replicated.com) and the proxy service (proxy.replicated.com). If a custom domain is referenced in the `replicatedRegistryDomain` or `proxyRegistryDomain` fields of the Application custom resource, the app manager will rewrite all registry.replicated.com and proxied private images using the vendor’s custom domains, thereby removing references to Replicated from the enterprise’s environment. If the vendor includes in their release a custom domain for the proxy service and/or the Replicated registry, those custom domains will be used in the value rendered by the LicenseDockerCfg template function too.
Application manager: Improve the TLS certificate workflow when accessing the admin console on a Kubernetes installer cluster for the first time (v1.91.2)
The previous workflow didn’t make it clear which fields should be used if you use self-signed certificates or upload your own. Now these workflows are more clearly separated and explained.
Application manager: Helm charts with required values that don’t have defaults can now be installed (v1.92.1)
If a chart had a required value but didn’t have a default (which is often the case), the license upload failed. This was particularly important for vendors who deployed a release using both the KOTS install and Helm install methods.
What’s New for the Kubernetes installer
Kubernetes installer: Support for Kubernetes 1.26 (v2023.01.03-0)
We overachieved and delivered support for this new version of Kubernetes before our 30 day SLA.
What’s New for Troubleshoot
Troubleshoot: Cluster resources collector deduplication (v0.50.0)
With the introduction of mergeable and updatable specs, it’s possible that the spec used by Troubleshoot could have duplicate collectors collecting the same information multiple times. This enhancement implements deduplication for one of our most common collectors, the cluster resources collector. This is the first of many collectors which will undergo this improvement.
Troubleshoot: The preflight CLI can now accept multiple specs as input via CLI args (v0.50.0)
Before this change, only a single Preflight or HostPreflight spec could be provided as input to the CLI. Now people and projects that use preflights can supply multiple specs.
What’s New for the Replicated Documentation
Replicated documentation: Added how to select storage add-ons for Kubernetes installers
A new About Selecting Storage Add-ons topic provides vendor-focused guidance on how to configure storage add-ons in Kubernetes installers based on the requirements for the application. This topic adds on to the content in Choosing a PV Provisioner in the kURL documentation by describing the specific recommendations that Replicated has for vendors with single node or multi-node installations. As part of this enhancement, we also reorganized the content about creating Kubernetes installers into a new top-level “Kubernetes Installer” section in the vendor documentation. This makes it easier for vendors to find the information they need when configuring their Kubernetes installer specifications without having to click several layers deep into the sidebar.
Replicated documentation: Update kURL docs with disk space requirements for directories
We documented the disk space requirements for both the core and add-on kURL directories in the System Requirements topic in the kURL documentation. This update comes from a request from the Support team, who noted that a customer recently ran into issues during installation in part because they were not able to find what the disk space requirements are for some of the kURL add-ons they included.
Replicated documentation: New "about releases" topic
We added a new “About Releases” topic to better explain the concept of creating a release for an application. This topic also provides an overview of the Releases page in the vendor portal, including details about the different actions that users can take while creating a release in the YAML editor. Previously, there was no central place in the documentation to find this information, making it difficult for vendors to learn about this fundamental concept. This addition is part of our larger effort to simplify and consolidate the topics about channels and releases in the documentation to make it easier for vendors to navigate.
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.