Spring is deploying quickly and so are the new features from our Product & Engineering teams. It’s time for another fresh batch of exciting capabilities newly available in our application manager, our Kubernetes installer, and the vendor portal. Check out the recently shipped features and release highlights for March 2023 below.
What’s New for The Vendor Portal:
Vendor Portal: Enhancement: Improved Customer Reporting
The new customer reporting provides much richer detail on the customer reporting page (one level up from the instance detail page). As many end customers run multiple instances, this helps in understanding customer health holistically before drilling down into any particular instance. Bringing a level of detail above the low level technical state of an instance means that additional vendor team members can get value from instance insights. If you’re in roles like sales, product, and customer success, we’d love to hear from you about what problems you’re solving with this page, or what you’d like to see added.
Docs for this feature can be found under Customer Reporting, and you can check our new blog post for more information or watch this video for a quick overview of the new page
Vendor Portal: Shareable URLs for Instance Details
The instance detail page has a number of toggles for navigation. This feature adds the ability for you to make some changes, copy a URL, and save that URL or share it with coworkers. For example, you might want to send a colleague a zoomed-out 90 days view or bookmark a few 2-day instance URLs to check during your morning coffee, or even share a deep link into a specific instance event like a version upgrade or cluster change.
Vendor Portal: Custom Domains for Download Portal
Now vendors can choose to have their customers access the download portal under their own domain. This can be handy from a domain allowlisting perspective or attempting to keep the experience more consistent with a vendor’s brand. Check out this demo and these docs for more information.
What’s New for The Application Manager:
Application Manager: Troubleshoot Debug Mode Can Show a Summary and Detailed Performance of Operations Executed by The Support-bundle and Preflight CLIs (Troubleshoot v0.57.0)
This new feature allows a user to see which collectors, redactors, and analyzers were run by the support-bundle and preflight CLIs. Vendors can also see whether each step succeeded, failed, or was skipped, and how long each took. This gives users more insight into the actions performed and the performance of each step. When collecting a support bundle, the summary is also included in the archive. To use this feature use --debug when collecting your support bundle.
Application Manager: Velero Install and Configure Enhancements (v1.94.0)
We streamlined the entire installation process for existing clusters by providing clearer contextual instructions and utilizing new Velero features. We also deprecated the kots velero print-fs-instructions command since it is obviated by this improved workflow. See also updated docs on configuring a host path storage destination and a NFS storage destination.
See this demo for more information and a comparison of the old and new workflows for installing Velero and configuring a host path storage destination.
Application Manager: Support for Velero 1.10 (v1.94.1)
Application Manager now supports Velero 1.10 to provide the latest bug fixes and features of Velero. This update to Velero changed the syntax of the velero install command. To see an example of the new syntax you can visit our documentation. If you are referencing velero commands in your own documentation, be sure to update those to the latest syntax.
Application Manager: Completely un-deploy an application and delete its resources from the cluster (v1.95.0)
You can now completely remove an application and keep the admin console in place. This can come in handy if you want to completely start over on an application install in a specific instance. You can use the feature by using kots remove --undeploy. For more details, read the documentation on the new feature here.
Application Manager: Status Informers Now Support DaemonSets (v1.95.0)
In addition to Deployment, StatefulSet, Service, Ingress, and PVC, you can now create a status informer for a DaemonSet. This improves the KOTS experience by letting vendors get statuses for more types of Kubernetes resources. See here to understand the conditions that contribute to each status for DaemonSets. If you have DaemonSets that contribute to your application health, update your status informers today.
What’s New for the Kubernetes installer
Kubernetes Installer: Flannel is now GA and the default CNI for kURL
Flannel support is now generally available and is the default on kurl.sh. We recommend updating your installer specifications to use flannel as soon as possible to keep your customers
Kubernetes Installer: Longhorn to OpenEBS Migration are GA (v2023.01.13-1)
The new Longhorn to OpenEBS migration is now available. If you want to hear more about our recent storage journey listen to this Replicon talk from our CTO Marc Campbell. You can read more about this on our detailed blog post on this topic here.
Kubernetes Installer: Longhorn to Rook migrations are GA (v2023.02.17)
We now support all migration paths from Longhorn to our currently supported storage providers (OpenEBS and Rook). Follow the links above or watch the Replicon video below for more information on how to migrate.
What’s New for the Replicated Documentation
Replicated Documentation: Guidance for Verifying SBOMs
We previously only had documentation for how to verify our SBOM signatures in Github repos – but no longer! Check out our new documentation here and go forth and verify!
Replicated Documentation: Added documentation for RBAC on existing cluster installs
A new RBAC Requirements section describes the specific RBAC permissions that a customer must have in the cluster or namespace where they install the Replicated Application Manager. To help clarify related details on the vendor side, we also rewrote the topic about how to enable minimal RBAC for the app manager.
Replicated Documentation: Added enterprise content for using the private registries tab
This new procedure documents how to configure private registries in the admin console. If you have customers using private registries you can include this into your own documentation or point them here!
Replicated Documentation: Added clearer requirements for air gap image registries
We reorganized, clearly labeled, and moved the image registry requirements for air gap clusters to the requirements area of the Installation section. Now air gapped customers know that they need a Docker image registry available inside the network before they can install.
That’s it for the March 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.