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Release Radar - Q4 2021

Postgres 14.0
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TLDR: 2x perf boost for connection-heavy tasks

  • JSON multirange datatype and other conveniences
  • Distributed workload enhancements (eg logical replication now supports streaming transactions)
  • Performance improvements (eg pipeline query support for high latency links, though requires client to be using a v14 compat driver)

Linkerd 2.11
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TLDR: K8s native mTLS policies!

  • K8s annotation (or CRD) configured, Linkerd mTLS enforced pod to pod authorization policies
  • Implemented logic to ensure sidecar proxy starts before workload container is initalized
  • More footprint reductions (control plane now only 3 Deployments, distroless images, micro-proxy further optimized)

Tailscale 1.16
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TLDR: broader container support

  • Linux containers can now run without NET_RAW and NET_ADMIN permissions! (eg hosted CI runners)
  • Authentication key can be sourced from a file (--authkey=file:/path/here)
  • Can now generate QR codes via CLI (tailscale up --qr)
  • Node state can now be stored as a K8s Secret
  • Now capable of presenting a HTTPS proxy (adding to existing SOCKS5 proxy support)

Grafana 8.2
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TLDR: dynamic plugin install

  • Plugins can now be installed from a webUI catalog and do not require instance restart
  • Grafana can now be made aware of (and present time ranges relative to) your organization’s fiscal year
  • Improved telemetry and tuning guidelines for image renderer (to improve performance for graph/image load times)

VictoriaMetrics 1.67
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TLDR: DataDog ingest

  • VM can now ingest metrics from DataDog’s emitters (both datadog-agent and dogstatsd)
  • VM’s web UI now uses the μPlot library for graphing
  • VM Enterprise now supports ingest from and export to Kafka

Harvester 0.3
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TLDR: rancher 2.6 integration

  • Dedicated ‘Virtualization Management’ section in the Rancher (2.61) web UI, and RKE1/2 node drivers
  • qcow2, raw and ISO images can now be uploaded/imported into Harvester
  • Terraform provider
  • Nodes now support multiple disks, sharing a floating IP, bonded NICs, and eviction

Argo Rollouts 1.1
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TLDR: too much awesome

  • Now supports automated rollbacks based on pod status (bypassing the need for a complex AnalysisRun)
  • Tight integration with Argo Notifications (engine)
  • The argo-rollouts krew plugin (and associated web UI) is now packaged as a discrete container image
  • Can now leverage Kustomize 4.x’s OpenAPI schema support to improve CRD compatibility
  • (Optional) dynamic scaling of the stable ReplicaSet
  • Improved AWS support: CloudWatch as metrics provider, ELB eccentricities better catered to
  • Improved Istio support: can now target VritualServices in connected clusters, parallel VirtualServices updates, sniHosts traffic splitting

Nomad 1.2
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TLDR: package manager

  • nomad-pack, a first party package manager, somewhat akin to Helm for Nomad
  • New sysbatch job type for running system-oriented tasks against cluster nodes
  • Web UI improvements surrounding system, batch, and sysbatch task executions

Waypoint 0.6
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TLDR: popular K8s ecosystem integrations

  • First party Helm chart to deploy Waypoint, and Helm integration for deploying using Waypoint
  • Kaniko integration for inside-K8s container builds
  • Deeper Kubernetes integration: Web UI now surfaces information of managed Deployments, and Waypoint can now configure Ingress + app auto-scaling

kops 1.22
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TLDR: K8s 1.22 support

  • AWS improvements: Instance Metadata Service v2 and external service account permissions (via IAM)
  • external-dns now supported as in-place replacement for dns-controller
  • Cilium WireGuard support
  • Shell completions for PowerShell, fish
  • Many new deprecations (K8s <1.18, older base OS’s eg CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 18 LTS etc)

Harbor 2.4
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TLDR: tracing support

  • Added distributed tracing capability (of Harbor itself)
  • Replication rules now support rate limiting and exclusion logic
  • Can now authenticate Harbor <-> Harbor replication using robot accounts

Consul 1.11
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TLDR: service mesh enhancements

  • ‘Administrative Partitions’ (namespaces), enabling multi-tenancy inside a shared, centralized cluster [Enterprise]
  • ‘API Gateway’, improved attributes based routing for Consul’s Ingress capability
  • New consul-k8s CLI to ease (quickstart) deployment of Consul clusters on Kubernetes

Windows Terminal 1.12
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TLDR: default PTY in Windows 11

  • Can now be set as default terminal emulator in Windows 11 (and W10 Insider), and intelligently loads profiles based on the launched binary
  • persistedWindowLayout option to restore previous tabs and panes after a relaunch
  • Elevated terminal windows are now designated with a shield icon to the left of their tab

GitLab 14.4
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TLDR: minor improvements & bugfixes

  • DAST scans can now be cron scheduled (independent of push trigger) [Ultimate]
  • New, ’native’ error tracking capability (still Sentry, but baked into your GitLab deployment)
  • VSCode extension can now open a read-only copy of a GitLab repo

Vitess 12.0
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TLDR: inclusivity refactor (breaking changes)

  • Feature-flag gated release of Gen4 execution planner
  • RBAC for VTAdmin (the admin web UI), though still no native authN
  • Project wide naming changes for inclusivity (master –> primary etc)

CDK for Terraform 0.7
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TLDR: AWS CDK compatibility

  • AwsTerraformAdapter facilitates using resources from AWS’ own CDK inside your CDKTF application
  • Provider API now only returns a type (instead of an array) when a block only returns once
  • Documentation improvements

Crossplane 1.5
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TLDR: ‘becoming boring’ (and proud of it!)

  • Support for ToUpper and ToLower in Compositions
  • Composition documentation updates

Prometheus 2.31
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TLDR: new query editor

  • PromQL editor removed in favour of codemirror-promql (syntax highlighting, linting, autocompletion etc)
  • Remote write now supports exemplars
  • New support for security related HTTP headers (eg CSP, HSTS)

Loki 2.4
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TLDR: no longer requires strict ordering!

  • New ‘simple scalable deployment’ reference architecture, a happy medium between single binary and microservice explosion
  • Loki’s config defaults improved and simplified
  • Promtail now has Kafka consumer capabilities

GitHub Enterprise 3.3
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TLDR: Actions enhancements

  • Added support for ephemeral (single job) runners and associated workflow_job webhook
  • New ‘security manager’ RBAC role (read on all repos, write on all security related settings/alerts org-wide)
  • Optional expiry dates for PAT’s (with renewal prompts via email)

PowerShell 7.2
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TLDR: improved (tab and predictive) completions

  • PSReadLine 2.1 (ships with Powershell 7.2) adds predictive IntelliSense capability
  • ANSI support enhancements, centering around introduction of a $PSStyle variable
  • pwsh can now be updated via Windows Update (adding to Microsoft Store method, introduced in W11)

Tempo 1.2
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TLDR: search performance

  • New ‘simple scalable deployment’ reference architecture, a happy medium between single binary and microservice explosion
  • Improved performance; 1.5x (search) to 2x (search disabled) more efficient than same workload running Tempo 1.1
  • Can now search (and find!) traces that are still in Grafana Cloud ingesters, ie not yet written to backend storage

Vault 1.9
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TLDR: OIDC provider!

  • PATCH operation and custom metadata for kv v2 engine [preview]
  • OIDC provider capability [preview]
  • Key management engine for GCP KMS [Enterprise]

Tailscale 1.18
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TLDR: better DNS handling

  • tailscale now supports storing runtime state in AWS SSM (Linux hosts only)
  • UPnP discovery enhancements (eg now aware of eero’s)
  • Improved handlers for IP and DNS configuration on Linux

Istio 1.12
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TLDR: K8s Gateway support

  • Support for the v1alpha2 release of K8s Gateway API
  • WasmPlugin API for configuring WebAssembly plugins
  • Improvements to the (1.11 introduced) Telemetry API and first-party Helm chart

Boundary 0.7
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TLDR: dynamic host catalogs

  • Automatic discovery of target hosts (in this release, support for AWS and Azure service registries)
  • Initial plugin support (above catalogs are built as plugins)
  • Web UI support for managed groups (created using OIDC IdP metadata) and resource filtering

GitLab 14.5
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TLDR: CI UX enhancements

  • Native support for infrastructure as code SAST scans using kics (Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible, CFN in this release)
  • Can now define MR approval settings at the group level (projects then inherit)
  • Pipeline editor now surfaces a more granular ‘mini graph’ status (previously only a single pass/fail drilldown graphic)
  • CI include keyword now supports conditionals
  • A README.md uploaded to a repository matching your username is now presented as the README on your profile page

HAProxy 2.5
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TLDR: dynamic servers

  • Fleshes out previous release’s API only capability to ‘hot’ manage server lifecycle (no restarts)
  • Dark mode for statistics page!
  • Experimental support for HTTP/3 and QUIC
  • Performance improvements (2-5%) on x86 platforms via threading optimizations

Kubernetes 1.23
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TLDR: tons, as always!

  • kubectl events command, an iterative enhancement (and breaking change, hence new subcommand) to kubectl get events
  • OpenAPI v3 support
  • Support for gRPC probes (HTTP/2 over TLS)
  • CRI-empowered container/pod stats, taking over from (and eventually sunsetting) cAdvisor
  • fsGroup operations delegated to CSI driver (also, EBS, Ceph, Portworx in-tree provisioners moved to CSI drivers)
  • Promotions: HPA v2, IPv4+IPv6 (dual stack), PodSecurity, ephemeral containers, topology aware hints, structured logging

Grafana 8.3
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TLDR: panel suggestions

  • New (first-party) candlestick panel type
  • Grafana Alerting promoted, now the default alerting experience (can ingest and thus co-exist with Alertmanager instances)
  • Web UI now analyzes user queries and suggests appropriate panel types
  • Now supports the database encryption key (stores datasource connection secrets) coming from a KMS [Enterprise]
  • Recorded queries capability, to transform point in time queried (eg Jira ticket count) data into a time series [Enterprise]

VictoriaMetrics 1.69 - 1.70
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TLDR: /config auth

  • Added now() function to MetricsQL (returns current time in seconds)
  • /-/healthy and /-/ready endpoints (mirroring Prometheus)
  • Writes to different remote storage backends can now occur in parallel
  • Writes to Kafka are now distributed across partitions
  • /config page can now be auth protected, and hides secrets (like Prometheus does)

Terraform 1.1
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TLDR: refactoring improvements

  • New moved HCL statement as an alternative refactoring approach to terraform state mv; improved UX when renaming or splitting resources / modules
  • plan and apply now have more verbose output, indicating why an action is being proposed/applied
  • Evolved CLI capabilities for interacting with Terraform Cloud/Enterprise (better error messages, support for workspace tags and -var argument)

Cilium 1.11
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TLDR: eBPF-based service mesh

  • New service mesh capability (L7 traffic management + load balancing ,TLS termination, canary rollouts, tracing etc) leveraging Cilium’s eBPF underpinnings [beta]
  • New integrated/’native’ Ingress capability, using eBPF and Envoy
  • Hubble now supports OpenTelemetry emissions for both traces and metrics
  • New topology aware routing capability (leveraging topology-aware-hints in K8s 1.21+)
  • Cilium’s kube-proxy replacement now compatible with Istio sidecars
  • New enterprise capabilities: Timescape (Hubble state saved to a Clickhouse database), Egress HA, eBPF (agentless) traces/metrics for HTTP/TLS/gRPC/DNS

Argo CD 2.2
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TLDR: Shift-left registration of repos/clusters

  • Project scoped (git) repositories and (K8s) clusters; admins define allowed patterns, users can then self-provision access inside those boundaries
  • Improved support for plugins, facilitating use of config management tools other than those natively supported (Kustomize, Helm, Jsonnet)
  • New argocd.argoproj.io/tracking-id annotation to augment the existing app.kubernetes.io/instance method

Argo CD ApplicationSet 0.3
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TLDR: new generators

  • New Pull Request generator (requires supported SCM API, so GH/GL at release)
  • New Merge generator, facilitates selectively overriding param’s from one generator with that of another
  • Sets with both valid/invalid Applications will now deploy the valid ones

VictoriaMetrics 1.71
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TLDR: concurrent queries in web UI

  • vmui can now display two queries on a single graph (eg when exploring correlations)
  • downsampling support [Enterprise]
  • vmauth and vmagent now support http/s paths for many config locale CLI arguments

GitLab 14.6
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TLDR: geo enhancements

  • Improved performance of globally distributed self-hosted GL clusters; secondary instances now also accept writes
  • GitLab Agent events are now published to an ‘activity list’ in the web UI
  • Can now toggle between WSIWYG and Markdown wiki editors
  • Private contributions now show in public contribution graphs
  • SSH key authentication can now be configured with (authentication validity) lifetimes
  • WebAuthn (including TouchID!) now enabled by default

Thanos 0.24
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TLDR: minor improvements (how has this not 1.0’ed?!)

  • New stateless mode for ruler component
  • New --alert.query-url argument for query component
  • Trace spans now show their cache name

Talos 0.14
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TLDR: log shipping

  • Faster node upgrades via kexec (similar to vSphere’s Quick Boot, skips BIOS initialization), and upgrade-k8s subcommand now incorporates updates for kubectl, CoreDNS and, if installed, Flannel
  • Cluster discovery feature now enabled by default (was behind flag in 0.13)
  • JSON log shipping (TCP and UDP transports, multiple destinations, service and kernel logs all supported)
  • SideroLink (integration with maintainer’s Sidero Metal SaaS product)