↓Skip to main content

Release Radar - Q4 2020

Rancher 2.5
#

TLDR: New UI, native multi-cluster deployment tooling

  • UI revamped to center around a significantly reworked ‘Cluster Explorer’
  • Multi-cluster CD functionality via new integration with Rancher’s Fleet
  • Rancher’s integrated Istio now bumped to 1.7
  • OPA Gatekeeper can be managed via the Rancher UI

GitHub Enterprise 2.22
#

TLDR: many of the headline 2020 features from GitHub cloud now available on-prem

  • GitHub Actions (CI)
  • GitHub Packages (artifact repo)
  • Code scanning functionality
  • New, responsive web UI

Consul 1.9
#

TLDR: Intentions, mesh visualization, K8s integrations

  • ‘Intentions’ facilitate allowing/denying traffic based on headers and URL paths
  • Web UI nwo visualizes service mesh topology, including (typical SLI) metrics
  • Consul’s service mesh can now be configured via K8s CRD’s
  • Consul’s health checking can now take into account K8’s own pod healthchecks

Terraform 0.14 Beta
#

TLDR: masked secrets, better diffs

  • Sensitive variables can now be redacted from console output
  • terraform plan diffs are now signifigantly more concise
  • Improved dependency vendoring via provider lockfiles (adds stickiness to existing pinning method)

Grafana 7.2
#

TLDR: not much

  • Fields no longer a beta feature, with new labels-to-fields transform option
  • New date formats
  • Group By transformation
  • Explore UI now allows toggling which fields Loki parses during searches

bank-vaults 1.6
#

TLDR: multi-datacenter support

  • version bumps: Vault 1.5.4, Kubernetes 1.19
  • vault-env now supports AWS authentication

TrueNAS 12
#

TLDR: FreeNAS re-branded, still open core

  • ZFS native crypto (per dataset config)
  • 2FA for both web UI and SSH
  • Fusion Pools (pure flash vdevs for storing meta data and small block IO, while keeping storage blocks on spindles)
  • KMIP support (external encryption key storage, eg the cloud KMSes, also in Vault Enterprise)
  • Can now act as both an OpenVPN client and/or server
  • API 2.0

CoreDNS 1.8
#

TLDR: transfer plugin improvements

  • transfer plugin now supports notifies (eg from file, auto, secondary, kubernetes)
  • cache fixes 1 2

GitLab 13.5
#

TLDR: transfer plugin improvements

  • Wiki’s can now be scoped to the Group level (previously only per-project)
  • ‘Kubernetes Agent’ (for GitOps) introduced in Premium tier
  • Releases can now include binaries(!)
  • Snippets can now include multiple files
  • Feature Flags now also included in Free/Core tiers
  • SAST now supports iOS and Android codebases
  • SAST (and the related secret detection feature) now support custom rules
  • SAST UI improvements
  • AutoDevOps now uses Helm 3
  • AutoDevOps now supports incremental rollouts

Nomad 1.0
#

TLDR: auto-adjustments to workload resource constraints, OSS namespaces

  • Dynamic application sizing (functionally analogous to VPA+Godilocks from K8s world)
  • Namespaces are no longer a EE exclusive feature
  • Topology view in web UI (similar to Consul 1.9 feature)
  • Global event stream
  • HCL2 compatibility
  • CNI-borne IP’s can now be exposed to Consul

Loki 2.0
#

TLDR: much more powerful query capabilities

  • Many new functions to bolster parsing, filtering, formatting and graphing using Loki ingested logs
  • Queries can now directly trigger Alertmanager using standard Prometheus syntax

Grafana 7.3
#

TLDR: dynamic dashboard updates, short links

  • Theme aware, standardised colour pallettes/gradients
  • Short links
  • Optional live/dynamic updates to published dashboards
  • Built in datasource insights and auditing (EE)

k9s 0.23
#

TLDR: filter negating!

  • Describe action now supports dynamic content updates and fullscreen mode
  • A new, combined Requests:Limits column for CPU and MEM
  • Negating inside filters now possible via !

HAProxy 2.3
#

TLDR: OpenTracing emitter

  • log-forward clause adds load balancing support for both TCP and UDP syslog traffic
  • OpenTracing API via a ‘stream processing offload engine’ (SPOE), ie HAProxy plugin

restic 0.11
#

TLDR: runtime optimizations for network backups

  • much more performant checks for unchanged files when interacting with network targets
  • VSS support on Windows
  • GCP OAuth
  • parent snapshot load failure during a backup now triggers verbose warning
  • many bugfixes

Crossplane 0.13/0.14
#

TLDR: 1.0 release looms

  • CompositeResourceDefinitions (XRDs) enable bespoke service classes for consuming backend public cloud infra via CompositeResourceClaims (XRCs)
  • improved kubectl plugin
  • package manager v2 (faster, upgrades, rollbacks)
  • AWS and Azure providers continue to mature
  • Packet provider (targets Equinix metal at first release)

Vault 1.6
#

TLDR: GHA and Azure Key Vault integrations

  • Auto-join for nodes in clusters using integrated storage and on cloud infrastructure
  • Cloud KMS integration tech preview, first targetting Azure Key Vault
  • Snapshots for integrated storage [EE]
  • Transform Engine improvements, including a UI [EE]
  • Seal mechanism now supports migration between those of the same type (eg between two GCP KMS keys)
  • Official integrations for GitHub Actions and AWS Lambda

Powershell 7.1
#

TLDR: predictive IntelliSense

  • ships with PSReadLine 2.1.0, wherein IntelliSense now uses your history to predict future commands
  • many bugfixes and behavioral inconsistences remedied in standard library of cmdlets

ArgoCD 1.8
#

TLDR: scale, scale-out, sync performance

  • Scalability improvements (’thousands of applications, hundreds of clusters’ from a single instance)
  • 10x performance improvement when targetting large monorepos
  • argocd.argoproj.io/manifest-generate-paths annotation for whitelisting directories to scan (rather than whole repo)
  • Web UI enhancements (git branch/tag autocomplete, more consistency, better filtering)
  • OCI registry support for Helm charts (eg Harbor v2.1)

Gitea 1.13
#

TLDR: Mermaid rendering, repo kanbans

  • Improved syntax highlighting
  • Kanban boards (bare bones implementation)
  • Mermaid JS now renders when browsing markdown in Gitea repos
  • ‘Adoption’ of on-disk repositories not yet linked to a Gitea repo
  • HIBP password (hash) checking
  • Migrations from GH/GL via a new web wizard

Istio 1.8
#

TLDR: Simplified inbound naming schema, Mixer removed

  • New inbound cluster name format (breaking change)
  • Protocol detection timeout now disabled by default
  • AuthorizationPolicy CR now has remoteIpBlocks and notRemoteIpBlocks fields
  • Mixer (deprecated in 1.6) now completely removed
  • istioctl can no longer be used to install ‘add-ons’ (Prometheus, Jaeger etc), as these should be installed and managed seperately
  • DNS proxy sidecar (experimental)

Kubernetes 1.20
#

TLDR: 43 ‘house cleaning’ enhancements

  • Volume Snapshots, providing a standardized way to snap vols of supported CSI providers
  • Dockershim deprecated (CRI compliant runtimes will continue to execute OCI images, so lay impact is negligible)
  • Support for mixed protocols in LoadBalancer Services (!)
  • kubectl debug, CronJob, CRI features graduate to beta
  • GracefulNodeShutdown [alpha] will attempt graceful termination of pods during worker node shutdown procedure
  • CSI drivers can request a scoped subset of service account tokens, and re-run the volume mount if necessary
  • in-tree log output that could leak credentials now reacts them

Lens 4.0
#

TLDR: extension API

  • New API to support extensibility of the IDE
  • Ingress view now shows LoadBalancer attributes
  • Explicit deployment ‘restart’ UI action
  • Replaced event polling with watches
  • Improved distribution detection

Atlantis 0.16
#

TLDR: ARM binary

  • pre_workflow_hooks for running custom scripts prior to workflow execution
  • --disable-apply switch
  • First release with an arm64 binary

Crossplane 1.0
#

TLDR: API and feature stability promises [for the 1.x semantic release]

  • Package manager now supports automatic resolution (installation) of dependencies
  • Prometheus metrics emitter

GitLab 13.7
#

TLDR: MR reviewers, auto-rollback

  • CI can now auto rollback to previous working release (and alert on having done so)
  • Merge Requests can now have distinct (seperate to assignee) reviewers
  • Issues can now be sorted by count of other issues they’re blocking
  • New quick action for cloning issues

Loki 2.1
#

TLDR: Baked-in Fluentbit output plugin

  • Fluentbit now ships with a loki output plugin by default (previously required an out-of-tree plugin)
  • Official Helm chart moved to Grafana’s central chart repo
  • Config files now support environment variable expansion