Today we are reviewing exciting new features of Mirantis Container Cloud in 2.8 release, including better updating and visibility, including new alerts and the ability to see the live status of your cluster.
Keep your clusters up to date
One of the advantages of Mirantis Container Cloud is that the system automatically updates when we release a new version. However, if your Container Cloud is managing outdated clusters, the update will be blocked. To unblock the update, you will need to upgrade any outdated managed clusters.
Starting with version 2.8, Container Cloud will notify users if they need to update any managed clusters, showing an ‘Update available’ next to the name of the outdated cluster. More information about the upcoming update is available in the hover text above the icon.
Administrators or operators will be notified whether any managed clusters are currently blocking the automated update of Container Cloud with an update icon in the Projects list.
StackLight Alerts to MS Teams, ServiceNow
In version 2.8 we have also expanded the range of ways in which you can get alerts from the logging, monitoring and alerting stack of Mirantis Container Cloud. Supported external services now include Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow, which are tremendously popular among our enterprise customers.
This is how the alerts from Container Cloud typically look in Teams:
ServiceNow interface can display a list of alerts from Container Cloud.
You can also drill down to an individual alert to see more details.
See your cluster status — live
Understanding the status fast is key to operating your cluster successfully. With version 2.8, the Container Cloud web interface now provides a way to easily check the state of the cluster and understand what’s happening.
Container Cloud reports the live status of a cluster in a popup window on the cluster listing page. The popup contains statuses of various objects in the cluster infrastructure, such as the Kubernetes service and components and the LMA stack components. In version 2.8, this information also includes the status of the infrastructure provider instances (virtual machines) and Cloud load balancer.
The ‘Load Balancer’ status indicates whether the Kubernetes API load balancer is operating correctly, and shows the ID of the corresponding object in the infrastructure API, as well as its state. Container Cloud constantly polls the infrastructure and updates the state information.
But what about the infrastructure itself? In Container Cloud, the infrastructure provider, or just “provider)”, is the controller application that creates and manages virtual machines, or “provider instances” in an underlay cloud via an API. The ability to identify and check the state of provider instances is crucial for telling whether the cluster is failing and why.
With the new visibility feature of release 2.8, you can check the overall state of all provider instances used by the cluster in the list of clusters. If any instances are not running, you will see a notation in the status list.
The list of Machines in the cluster will give you the ID of the provider instance.
The popup window will also show you any issues with the instance.
Once you have the instance ID, you can use the infrastructure API and take corrective action.
So those are the key new features in Mirantis Container Cloud 2.8. For more information or a demo of these or other features, please contact us.