Mirantis Container Cloud 2.9 overview
- June 16, 2021
The new release of Container Cloud is focused on improving the user experience with different aspects of the administration and operation of the cloud. On VMware, you can now select resources from lists pulled by MCC from your VMware cluster. On other providers, improved management of SSL certificates and SSH keys was added. Bootstrap was optimized for using from a fresh node, making seed node completely stateless and expensable.
For example, here is how it looks when you need to configure Networking for your cluster:
The dropdown shows the list of objects of the supported types that are available with the credentials that you use to create the cluster. Note that the type of the object is shown on the right.
It could be tricky sometimes to determine full path to the resource pools, but worry not – we have it covered:
The dropdown selection of the values is available for all parameters that require you to specify a VMware API object.
This improves the overall security of MCC making it easier for users to verify that they reached the legitimate site whenever they access MCC web UI.
See details in the official documentation.
Thanks for reading about our latest release! If you're not already using MCC, you can start a free trial here.
VMware resources in the Container Cloud UI
In version 2.9, we made it simple for the user to tell Container Cloud what resources to use when creating a Cluster. Instead of looking through the throngs of entries in your vCenter dashboard, trying to figure out the paths and names of the resources, you could select them directly from dropdown menus in the MCC UI itself when you create your clusters.For example, here is how it looks when you need to configure Networking for your cluster:
The dropdown shows the list of objects of the supported types that are available with the credentials that you use to create the cluster. Note that the type of the object is shown on the right.
It could be tricky sometimes to determine full path to the resource pools, but worry not – we have it covered:
The dropdown selection of the values is available for all parameters that require you to specify a VMware API object.
TLS certificates for the management cluster
Starting with release 2.9, you can bootstrap MCC with your own TLS certificates. Just disable OIDC integration when bootstrapping the management cluster, and run a CLI command to provide your own certificates for Keycloak and for the MCC web UI.This improves the overall security of MCC making it easier for users to verify that they reached the legitimate site whenever they access MCC web UI.
See details in the official documentation.
Bootstrap from fresh seed node
If you have deployed an MCC management cluster, and plan to deploy regions later, you now can save just the kubeconfig file for the management cluster and discard your seed node. You can create another seed node later, following the documentation, and use it to deploy your regions at any time. Just don't forget to keep that kubeconfig for your management cluster!Ceph RBD mirroring
From the release 2.9, MCC Ceph supports cross-cluster replication of RBD images, also known as RBD mirroring. You can enable and configure RBD mirroring only via Container Cloud API at the moment, using the official documentation. This is a powerful feature for backup and disaster recovery for operators with multiple clusters on bare metal. You can configure certain Ceph pools to be safely backed up to a different bare metal cluster under the same MCC region or in a different region.Thanks for reading about our latest release! If you're not already using MCC, you can start a free trial here.
