Mirantis Container Cloud 2.15 Elevates the Software as a Service Experience

Today we released Mirantis Container Cloud 2.15. This latest release improves your cloud native experience in several ways, including providing a better onboarding experience, more control over maintenance for operators, and better integration with other related products. In this Blog we’ll provide you with an overview of the key enhancements introduced in this latest release.

Context aware gudied tour

In this latest release of Mirantis Container Cloud, we made a significant effort to improve the method of user onboarding to the Mirantis Container Cloud User Experience by providing enhanced usability for new or returning users working with the Mirantis Container Cloud UI.

For new users, we are enabling a “Guided Tour” mode that will be on by default on first sign-in. This tour will guide them through their first interactions with Mirantis Container Cloud, such as Cluster Creation, Machine Creation and their related options. For returning users, we are providing the opportunity to access a “refresher tour” in order to help update their knowledge of the Mirantis Container Cloud UI and new features they might have missed.

At Mirantis we place a high priority on the User Experience, and we are always collecting feedback from our customers to make workflows more intuitive and efficient through the use of context and focus based on role. We are already planning further enhancements, such as seamless integration with Lens – look for these enhancements in the near future.

Maintenance scheduling

We have heard from our customers with sensitive and complex lifecycle policies that they need more control over the upgrade process. As a result, with Mirantis Container Cloud 2.15, we have enhanced the Upgrades, Auto Upgrades, and Maintenance process to provide users with the control they desire.

With this new release we are enabling users to specifically configure their Auto Upgrade scheduling, with the direct ability to delay or postpone maintenance windows. This capability is critically important to customers that are bound to dedicated time windows within their organizational structure and compliance policies for any operational manipulations.

This feature is implemented and available through the Mirantis Container Cloud API.

You can find the full documentation for this feature here

Machine Maintenance API

In this release we are also introducing a new feature that enables users to work with a dedicated Machine Maintenance API, in order to put designated machines into maintenance mode for detailed operational tasks, such as patching the operating system for vulnerabilities or updated packages, etc. Once the machine is at the desired state it can be easily brought back into the cluster. This is very important to customers with a desire to manage specific machines by their own Operations or to customers with massive RHEL/CentOS deployments.

Integrational updates

Mirantis Container Cloud 2.15 introduces two updates for vertical integration and operations.

First, we are fully supporting Mirantis Container Runtime 20.10.8, thus bringing Mirantis Container Cloud in sync with the current Mirantis Container Runtime offering and providing better vertical integration with the rest of our products and improving the overall Mirantis experience.

Secondly we are introducing full support for Ubuntu 18.04 with 5.4 kernel to the Bare Metal provider, as part of our longstanding dedication to provide the best (up to date) experience to customers who want to consume Cloud as a Service across any footprint, including the latest hardware platforms. As security issues with more recent versions of Ubuntu are resolved we will be adding support for them to our product lineup.

Technical Preview

At Mirantis we have a long standing tradition of providing our customers with an early view of features and technologies in the works so that you can provide early feedback before we finalize these items. In Mirantis Container Cloud 2.15 we are introducing several new features as Technical Previews.

First is CephFS RWX PVs available via the CSI plugin. This is a frequently requested feature from customers who wish to leverage flexible RWX filesystems for specific applications such as HA databases and container registries (including Mirantis Secure Registry on K8s).

Second, we are introducing the ability to use custom names for machines – specifically “short” names – that may be used when implementing internal naming schemes related to a given customer’s security or compliance policies.

Please keep in mind that Technical Preview features are intended for testing and evaluation purposes and may undergo changes in future – and we want to receive your feedback on these items. If you’d like to share feedback on these or other features, please reach out to us.

To learn more about other changes and enhancements in Mirantis Container Cloud 2.15, you can view the release notes, or if you are not using Mirantis Container Cloud today and would like to give it a try, we encourage you to give give it a spin with our Mirantis Container Cloud Free Trial.