This month, we share with you a fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available inKOTS(Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf),kURL, and Vendor Web. Let’s take a look at some of the recently shipped features and release highlights for June 2021 below.
New Release Highlights:
- kURL: New CSI Option Available
- kURL: Pin the Kubernetes installer to a specific kURL release version
- KOTS: Now automatically identifies a v2 vs. v3 Helm chart
- KOTS: New CLI capabilities
- Vendor Web: Better view, search and filter of KOTS application customers
- Vendor Web: Improved management of team member invites
- Vendor Web: Time stamping uploaded support bundles
- Vendor Web: Phased design improvements for improved user experience
kURL: New CSI Option Available
Longhorn is now available as a new PVC Provisioner add-on for kURL installations. An alternative to Rook, Longhorn is a CNCF Sandbox Project originally developed by Rancher labs as a“lightweight, reliable and easy-to-use distributed block storage system for Kubernetes”. Longhorn uses a microservice-based architecture to create a pod for every Custom Resource in the Longhorn ecosystem: Volumes, Replicas, a control plane, a data plane, etc.
kURL: Pin the Kubernetes installer to a specific kURL release version
kURL now supports pinning a specific kURL release version in the Kubernetes installer. By specifying a kURL version in the URL (or installer spec itself), you can reproduce a particular version of kURL within your installation or upgrade. This will help support more reproducible installs. What’s more, when building your installer, kURL will help validate if selections are being made that are in conflict with your selected kURL version — like in the screenshot below, where kURL detects and alerts the user to an error found.
A couple notes here: First, the feature is opt-in, and if the kURL version is not present in the installer spec, it will default to “latest”, which is the current installer behavior. Second, because kURL versions are point-in-time releases, you may miss out on important security and bug patches if you don’t test and upgrade to newer pinned kURL versions often.
KOTS: Now automatically identifies a v2 vs. v3 Helm chart
KOTS currently defaults to using Helm v2 to process all HELM charts, requiring vendors that use Helm v3 charts to explicitly declare v3 in helm Version in the HelmChart spec. When this requirement was missed, Helm v3 charts could fail, leaving deployments in an inconsistent state.
As of v1.43.0, KOTS will now intelligently determine which Helm version should be used. If the helm Version is not explicitly set in the HelmChart spec, KOTS will attempt to determine the version of Helm to use based on the apiVersion key in Chart.yaml.
KOTS: New CLI capabilities
Recent releases of KOTS have also added new capabilities to the KOTS CLI.
Added the ability to provide a Docker Hub username and password via the kots docker ensure-secret CLI command that the Admin Console can utilize when pulling images to increase rate limits when experiencing installation issues due to Docker’s anonymous and free authenticated user rate limits (available as of KOTS v1.44.0).
New kots reset-tls CLI command is available. If a bad TLS certificate is uploaded to the Admin Console or the kotsadm-tls secret is missing, the kots reset-tls command will reapply a default self-signed TLS certificate (available as of KOTS v1.42.0).
Vendor Web: Better view, search and filter of KOTS application customers
It is now easier to find and manage KOTS application customers with the new abilities to 1) view archived KOTS application customers, and 2) filter those customers by channel.
Vendor Web: Improved management of team member invites
We’ve heard from vendors that managing invited members has been difficult due to having only visibility to active team members. With this latest improvement, vendors can now also see Pending and Expired invites, and adjust their provisioning — remove them, edit permissions, or re-send an invitation.
Vendor Web: Time stamping uploaded support bundles
Uploaded support bundles now have a time stamp on them, making it easier for vendors to distinguish multiple support bundles uploaded on the same day.
Vendor Web: Phased design improvements for improved user experience
And lastly, take a look at the “Channels Boxes” and the navigation bar in Vendor Web, where you will notice the first of several design adjustments we’re making to create a more unified vendor experience across touchpoints. Stay tuned for the next phase of updates!
That’s it for this month’s release highlights! We would love to help you learn more about these new features and what Replicated does to help vendors and customers install and manage modern apps on-prem —Click here to schedule a demo.