The latest news and articles from Replicated; about our product, the kubernetes and enterprise software world, and our communities.
The first metric we’ll dive into in the Instance Insights series is time to install. The time it takes for end users to get a vendor’s software up and running in a new environment is a key indicator of the quality of the packaging, configuration, testing, and documentation of the delivery of a software product.
At RepliCon Q4 2022, one of Replicated’s Senior Product Managers, Dex Horthy, sat down with Dilan Orrino, DJ Mountney, and Jason Plum from GitLab and chatted about how their team things of excellence in software distribution.
Replicated hands-on labs are a great resource to learn everything you need to be successful in distributing and supporting your application in your customers’ diverse Kubernetes environments.
This week, Replicated’s Vendor Experience team shipped a complete rebuild of our telemetry and reporting pages for the health and status of vendors’ end-customer instances running in the field. This is the first feature in our improved Instance Insights capabilities theme making it easy for Vendor Support Engineers and other customer-facing staff to understand the health and performance of a customer instance in one place.
This is the first article of a series in which we'll dive into using strategic metrics to drive excellence in commercial off-the-shelf software. It's important to align on what to measure and how before launching any customer-hosted or on-prem initiative.
Check out the recently shipped Replicated features and release highlights for January 2023.
We describe how to setup an inner loop development cycle with Application Manager (KOTS) and use Tilt to automate that inner loop for truly rapid release iteration.
Replicated today announced the successful completion of our System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type 2 attestation for security and confidentiality. This achievement reflects the company’s commitment to cybersecurity.
November brought with it shorter days and longer nights, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams were undeterred preparing a feast of new features. See the latest new Replicated features in this edition of Recent Release Highlights!
Your kURL installer specification allows you to specify what components (add-ons) you want in your embedded K8s cluster. Those component versions can be pinned, which helps get everyone running the same versions.
We believe there is a place for SaaS software, and it is important to understand how the decision between the self-managed vs SaaS is made. This post explains the two primary axes of the decision.
As the leaves drop, so do the new features. Check out all of the latest features that landed in October
Starting in v1.89.0, the app manager uses rqlite instead of Postgres to store metadata like version information. This change is the first step toward a more highly available and more supportable app manager.
We're happy to announce some new updates for the Troubleshoot project to help make debugging K8s applications more modular and dynamic, including online specs.
Our enhanced Helm offering has progressed to an “open beta” stage. This means both vendors currently using Replicated and the general public are now eligible to apply to join our beta program.
Spring and summer gave autumn a miss, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams are charging ahead on our product roadmap! Check out all the new stuff in this recap.
When using kURL for an on-prem Kubernetes installation, it is possible to enable GPU support with some minor changes in the kURL spec. This blog post will guide you through the different steps needed to enable GPUs.
Summer may be winding down, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams are moving full steam ahead on our product roadmap! It’s time for another fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available.
Replicated sponsors an open source project called Troubleshoot, follow the link for the official troubleshoot.sh page. There are two major sides to Troubleshoot, which are preflight checks and support bundles.
An overview of the new Helm install method with Replicated, and a walkthrough of installing an application using Helm and using the admin console.
As part of our continuing effort to help vendors ship software securely to their customers, we added a new feature that enables you to create a Kubernetes node that meets CIS benchmark best practices.
July was another big month for the Replicated Product & Engineering teams! We have some exciting new capabilities to share based on input from vendors like you.
This blog is going to be a little different – rather than tell you about all the wonderful ways Replicated is helping software vendors, we’re going to explore what the experience is for those companies who try to build their own DIY software distribution tooling.
Preflight Checks allow ISVs to define specific checks for each release to ensure the environment has been appropriately provisioned and all system requirements are met. Read on to learn more about how Preflight Checks reduce customer frustration and speed up the time to value for a newly deployed application.
The admin console application dashboard and version history pages of Replicated's App manager have now been redesigned for aesthetic and functional improvements. Read on for an in-depth look at all of the recent changes for your end customers!
June was another big month for the Replicated Product & Engineering teams! We have some exciting new capabilities to share based on input from vendors like you.
We’re always hard at work adding new enhancements and features to Replicated. Read all about them in our newest Replicated Release Highlights blog!
This feature enhancement allows you to specify if you want a failed preflight check to block a requested application deployment.
Replicated recently released two great new features that are even more powerful when used together: our new support for semantic versioning and automatically deploying updates.
April was an exciting month for us! We’re always hard at work adding new enhancements and features to Replicated. Read all about them in our newest Replicated Release Highlights!
Schemhero enables Kubernetes administrators to create, import, and manage containerized databases using the same YAML definitions used for virtually every other component of a Kubernetes cluster. Read how in our new post!
March was an exciting month for us! We’re always hard at work adding new enhancements and features to Replicated. Read all about them in our newest Replicated Release Highlights!
Believe it or not, our engineers have made troubleshoot.sh even better by creating a supplementary plugin that converts `support-bundle` output from JSON to standard `kubectl` output, saving even more time & flowing seamlessly into standard workflows for Kubernetes admins.
We're all fans of AC/DC, but as it turns out, a lot of Kubernetes developers are fans of Helm charts, as well. Watch our newest webinar, Highway to Helm: Operationalizing Kubernetes App Delivery now!
One of our primary goals at Replicated is to make the distribution and management of your application easy. Read all about our brand new Replicated docs in this announcement post.
February may be the shortest month of the year, but we’ve still managed to pack in several new enhancements to Replicated. Read all about them in our newest Replicated Release Highlights!
In this post, we sit down again with Replicated Product Manager Alex Parker to discuss the ins and outs of a Kubernetes app’s Day 2 experience.
New year, same great product innovation from Replicated! Check out the recently shipped features and release highlights for January 2022 below.
In upcoming releases of the Replicated app manager and Kubernetes installer, we will introduce two exciting new features that we want you to be aware of.
New and existing Replicated users now have the ability to sign in to their Replicated.com vendor portal accounts using Google Authentication.
In this blog, we’ll show you what’s involved in delivering a modern app to the enterprise, what the challenges are in doing so, and why it’s so valuable to get it right.
Wait a minute, what do we mean, “December”? It’s January! Yes, and Happy New Year! Like many of you, we took a little time off between the holidays to cozy up by a fire, sip some hot cocoa, and enjoy some much-needed time off with friends and family.
Happy New Year friends! Replicated Engineering is always working to provide the best support experience for you and your teams. Continuously evaluating and improving our processes for your benefit is a top priority and we can’t wait to share a few new updates with you happening in the new year!
We’re not affected by any log4j vulnerabilities as our products don’t use Java. If you have any questions or would like additional information, please reach out to [email protected] with any inquiries.
Observability has emerged front-and-center in the DevOps toolkit for optimizing organizational performance and delivering high-output, high-quality software. Observability methods and tools are evolving rapidly, from scraping and sampling to tracing and indexing.
We’ve recently built the Replicated Beta Program! Because we are inventors, designers, and tinkerers at heart; we are constantly iterating on the Replicated product. New capabilities, features, use cases — our imaginations for new Kubernetes (K8s) solutions are limitless.
We talk to developers every day and know what exceptional specialists they are at designing code to solve their customers’ challenges creatively. But when it comes to configuring and planning for that app to be installed ‘on-prem,’ tasks like installing a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster or setting up the app for delivery of future releases to […]
We have improved our support for Helm charts with additional supported “hooks” and “hook weights.” Replicated also updated its Helm chart install mechanism. Many Replicated vendors have existing investments in Helm, an open-source project that helps to manage Kubernetes apps.
Are you settling in yet to your autumn vibe? We are! Our team here at Replicated is really enjoying our apple ciders, campfires, and general fall coziness.
By Jason Bloomberg (@TheEbizWizard) – Intellyx | Part 3 of the Intellyx On-Prem Innovation Series In the first two articles in this series (which you can find here and here), my colleague Jason English explained why many enterprises would prefer air gapped software installs over putting software in the cloud.
October was a big month in our space as we prepared for, sponsored, attended, and presented content at KubeCon 2021! We hope you were able to participate in the show in some way — in person or virtually.
September is a month of change, as summer leaves us and cooler weather for many helps usher in the early part of fall. Still, our classic Replicated fervor is still in full swing, and we’re back again with a fresh batch of exciting new developments and release highlights.
We’ve been hearing from vendors that you want additional flexibility and control over token-based access, so we’ve spent the last several weeks digging into the user problem and exploring best practices and solutions. The result? New and improved tokens, which provide more controlled API and CLI access in the vendor portal!
Summer may be winding down, but the Replicated Product & Engineering teams are moving full steam ahead on our product roadmap! It’s time for another fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available in KOTS (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf), our embedded K8s installer (kURL), and Vendor Web.
By Jason English (@bluefug) – Intellyx| Part 2 of the Intellyx On-Prem Innovation Series When I think of the most mission-critical on-premises secure installation scenario of all time, my mind immediately wanders to silos. Missile silos, to be exact.
Time for another fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available in KOTS (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf), and kURL! Check out the recently shipped features and release highlights for July 2021 below.
This month, we share with you a fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available in KOTS (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.
With the dawn of cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and the rapid adoption among enterprises, there’s one thing that may come as a surprise: on-prem sales and demand are rising, and modern software companies are offering more enterprise delivery options than ever before.
Depending on your background, how word association works in your mind, or your search engine technique, hearing the phrase “airgap environment” might trigger thoughts of anything ranging from spaceships to dishwashers. Despite the interesting and seemingly unrelated word choice, Replicated has not decided to move into the home improvement space – though there may be […]
This month, we bring you another post in our ongoing blog series highlighting some of the exciting capabilities newly available in KOTS (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf), kURL, and Vendor Web. Let’s take a look at some of the recently shipped features and release highlights for May 2021 below.
Greetings and welcome back to the Replicated Runthrough series, where we teach you about each project in the Replicated catalog in simple terms. This week’s episode will be on KOTS – a.k.a. Kubernetes Off The Shelf software.
Dimensional Research has just released a new report, The State of On-Prem: Modern Solutions for a Traditional Problem, based on a survey sponsored by Replicated.
Greetings and welcome back for the next episode of the Replicated Runthrough series. This time we’re going to discuss Outdated.sh, an open source kubectl plugin that finds and reports outdated cluster images.
Greetings and welcome to part two of the Replicated Runthrough series. We’ll will be covering Troubleshoot.sh, a Kubernetes plugin for – you guessed it – troubleshooting host and cluster-level issues.
Last month we kicked off this new regular blog series where we update you on some of the exciting capabilities newly available in KOTS (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf), kURL, and Vendor Web.
TL;DR – kURL deploys entire Kubernetes clusters, pre-configured with as many or as few add-ons as your organization needs, delivered via the cURL utility. Greetings and welcome to our new Replicated Runthrough series, where we teach you about each project in the Replicated catalog in simple terms.
Historically, delivering on-prem software has meant building bespoke, manual processes for every customer environment; costing time, resources, and money. Thanks to new, off-the-shelf solutions, delivery, and management have gotten easier than ever.
Greetings and welcome back to our series on getting familiar with the Replicated Vendor Portal. In this episode, we’re going to talk a bit about the different types of container image registries available to use with Replicated KOTS – or any other Kubernetes clusters.
Have you been running a Kubernetes cluster for a while without updating? Do you have concerns that images running in your cluster might be a bit… old? Want a quick, easy, straight-forward solution to updating cluster images that doesn’t take forever to install? Well, we have just the answer for you – Outdated.sh!
Today, we’re excited to announce the release of SchemaHero 0.12. This is our first release as a CNCF Sandbox project, and we are thrilled with the community involvement and progress of the project.
They say, “An ounce of preparation is better than a pound of cure.” This holds true for many situations, none more so than making sure that your organization is prepared in the dreaded event that something – whether it be an HSD, a fire, a spilled drink, or a flock of wild pigeons – takes […]
As our team and product grows, we’re making big strides with feature improvements to make your Replicated experience even better. This article kicks off what will be a regular blog series announcing new features, with a breakdown of the latest additions to KOTS (Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf).
KOTS is awesome if your clients are already running K8s – but what about the ones who haven’t fully been caught up in the K8s wave yet and are ready to make the jump? Well, the Replicated Vendor Portal offers a solution for that, using another Replicated product named kURL. We’ll definitely talk more about kURL in later blogs, but for now the TL;DR of what kURL is, is that it’s a custom Kubernetes distribution builder and installer that uses a cURL one-liner to build out a cluster. For this specific use case, KOTS is combined with kURL to install Kubernetes, then install your application all in one go.
Starting in KOTS v1.31.0, the Snapshots feature set that can be used to back up and restore applications, as well as restore from disaster recovery scenarios, is now generally available (GA), further improving Replicated’s Day 2 operational capabilities for third-party software vendors.
Greetings friends and welcome to part one of a series on getting familiar with the Replicated catalog. We’re going to start with KOTS – short for Kubernetes-off-the-shelf software.
If you were around in the tech industry back in The Olde Days, before containerization revolutionized infrastructure, you have probably lived through at least one Host Server Down (HSD) caused by a conflict in an OS patch, a missing dependency, an out-of-control logfile or any number of fairly common yet highly annoying reasons.
Interest in the adoption of Kubernetes (K8s) has certainly exploded over the past 3-5 years, but as with any next wave technology, there’s still a lot of confusion in the market about how to best leverage it to accelerate your business goals.
We’re excited to share that SchemaHero has been accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox project. While SchemaHero has always been an open source project, we are now transferring ownership to the CNCF.
Today we’re excited to announce the 0.9.0 release of SchemaHero. SchemaHero continues to be an OSS project we use internally and believe others will find useful as they move to Kubernetes.
Replicated KOTS now has native support for packaging Helm charts as a component, or even as a KOTS application by itself. This works for both Helm 2 charts & the new Helm 3 charts.
kURL is an open source upstream-Kubernetes, custom distro creator. Think of kurl.sh as a link shortener for your favorite Kubernetes base components (aka add-ons). It creates a unique URL for your specific combination of components that can be installed with cURL on a modern Linux server.
kURL is an open source project from Replicated that allows anyone to create a custom Kubernetes distro. One of the primary use cases of kURL is for distributing Kubernetes with an application or Helm chart to an enterprise customer who doesn’t have an existing cluster.
We recently recorded a demo of installing a Kubernetes Off-The-Shelf (KOTS) application as a private instance. In this video we play the role of both application vendor and enterprise IT admin, so you have to follow along closely to catch some of the nuance of the demo.
Today Replicated is announcing its new Replicated KOTS platform. Replicated KOTS provides software vendors with the tools they need to operationalize and scale the distribution of their Kubernetes application into enterprise environments. Those tools include Kubernetes-native versions of release channels, customer license management, automated troubleshooting and a nextgen end-customer admin experience.
At Replicated, we believe that all software should be built to support modern on-prem installations. Most software requires at least one database, and reliable, automated database schema management is essential for application updates. To help enable this, we are introducing a new open source project named SchemaHero.
Replicated is releasing a major improvement to our support bundle tool and renaming the expanded feature to Replicated Troubleshoot. Support bundles have long been a core feature of Replicated, enabling vendors to collect a myriad of information from their on-prem customers’ instances for analysis and remediation.
Amazon’s long-awaited Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) is here, which means everybody operating in the world of cloud-native applications and Amazon Web Services should probably develop at least a baseline understanding of what it does and how it works.
Docker containers and Kubernetes have already changed the way that applications are packaged and developed, but that’s only a part of their total promise.
The Replicated Help Center is the definitive source of all information for distributing and installing applications with Replicated. Over the past few months, we’ve evaluated customer feedback on how they’re using the Help Center and what they’d like to see.
We are excited to announce Replicated Studio, an isolated development environment which gives you and your team a faster way to build and iterate on your application releases. Over the last few months, we’ve been working to improve the development workflow.
Developers and teams are happiest when they release higher quality updates more often. And most importantly, so are your customers. Great tooling plays an important part in helping everyone reach this happy place.
Recently, Docker split their installation into two different packages: Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The enterprise edition of Docker does not include any additional features, but rather it is built to run on operating systems that are designed for enterprise use.
In one of our recent posts, we looked at some of the core strategies for reducing a docker image size. Since then, new ways to reduce an image size have emerged, enabling even faster distribution of images and startup times.
We’re excited to announce the release of a newly redesigned frontend for vendor.replicated.com. Over the past couple of years, we’ve been constantly updating the default, vanilla, bootstrap-powered version, but we decided to shake things up a bit and redesign it.
All Replicated instances are installed with a single license file. The license file is connected to a release channel, and the installation will receive updates when a new release is promoted to that channel. This process has worked pretty well so far and continues to be the best option for most installations.
Out of the box, Replicated always runs a set of preflight checks when your application is first installed or when any update is being installed. We check to make sure the server(s) and the environment running Replicated meets our minimum requirements and we offer some options to configure this to allow application developers the control […]
When deploying a secure system it is important to ensure that each component only has access to the lowest level of privileges needed to perform its task. This concept should apply to any access in a system, including the user account and file system permissions need to spawn processes successfully.
We’ve recently shipped one of the most requested features in Replicated: the ability for Replicated to self-update! This isn’t enabled by default; read more about how the feature works and how to use it.
The installable components of Replicated that your customers interact with are now more configurable with the introduction of the Management Console Settings screen. The layout is similar to the customizable configuration screen that allows each of your customers to configure their instance of your application.