Where do Ubuntu 20.04, OpenSearch, Tungsten Fabric, and more all come together? In the latest Mirantis Container Cloud releases!
In the last several weeks we have released two updates to Mirantis Container Cloud – versions 2.16 and 2.17, which bring a number of important changes and enhancements. These are focused on both keeping key components up to date to provide the latest functionality and security fixes, and also delivering new functionalities for our customers to take advantage of in their deployments. The sections below will provide an overview of the major changes in these recent releases.
Transition to OpenSearch
In version 2.16, we have transitioned from an older implementation of Elasticsearch to a fully open source OpenSearch solution, providing customers the benefits of faster access to the latest feature updates and patches while also making it easier to stay up to date with security and fixes.
We have made it our top priority to maintain the highest security standards for our customers who rely on our technology in their daily business and trust us with their mission critical workloads. Migration and integration of OpenSearch into Mirantis Container Cloud enables us to continue to deliver on this priority, while also continuing our commitment to leveraging the best that the open source community offers in terms of new and innovative features.
Transition to Ubuntu 20.04
Starting with Mirantis Container Cloud 2.17, we now support Ubuntu 20.04 for greenfield deployments. This is important to our customers for a number of reasons:
Support for newer hardware, such as AMD EPYC, which supports highly-dense computing with many cores per socket.
Support for specific hardware modules for security and compliance purposes
Performance enhancements provided by the 5.4 Linux kernel
Ability to set up FIPS compliance for each host
This transition is a part of our long-term commitment to deliver a Software-as-a-Service experience for customers who have complex and demanding requirements when it comes to operating systems standards.
Full support for Mirantis Container Cloud on Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes with Tungsten Fabric
The Use Case of aligning and collocating the VM world near the Container ecosystem is still very popular among our customers, and with Mirantis Container Cloud 2.17, we are making this even more attractive.
By enabling the highly popular Tungsten Fabric L2/L3 networking overlay as a point of integration between Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes (MOSK), we bridge the gap between the VM and Container ecosystems. View the MOSK docs for Tungsten Fabric.
Customers from both the financial services and telecommunications verticals already appreciate the benefits of the Tungsten Fabric-enabled Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes, and now they can seamlessly expand and/or step into the Container story with Mirantis Container Cloud.
User Interface improvements
In Mirantis Container Cloud 2.16, we have added several improvements to the User Interface, providing an enhanced overall user experience.
First, we have added the menu group for license management, whereby users can easily verify their license and update it. The process of updating the license was previously a rather technically complex procedure, and we aimed to drastically simplify this operation along with delivering the bonus capability of automatically propagating licenses into managed clusters (including regional clusters) without triggering any update procedures, thus eliminating unnecessary potential disruptions.
The second major improvement to the user experience is enabling users to conveniently manage and set up maintenance windows via a user interface, which was previously only possible through an API.
Auditability and reporting
With these new releases, we are providing an Event History controller, that enables our customers to set up an appropriate time frame for event logging (ranging from hours to days). This is intended to reduce the overall Mirantis Container Cloud per cluster footprint and make event collection as convenient as possible. It also makes audits for either individual clusters or the whole solution more efficient. In release 2.16, we additionally introduced “scrape configs” for Prometheus in order to enable the attachment of customer metric exporters.
Another key enhancement we introduced is the Reporting feature for the release controller. Inside of Mirantis Container Cloud, there is a dedicated component known as the release controller, that delivers new releases of the product and helps you plan and manage your upgrades. If this controller malfunction, it will now trigger alerts, as well as add information to telemetry, that will inform you of any issues. This reporting is critically important for customers who want to stay up to date on Mirantis Container Cloud releases and enjoy the benefits of the Software as a Service approach.
Technical innovations
In almost every release, we add technical innovations that happen “under the hood” of Mirantis Container Cloud and may not always make the “top features” list or get highlighted in release blogs like this one. However, we think it is important that our customers understand the ongoing work and innovation that we produce to continually improve Mirantis Container Cloud, often in subtle ways. Below are several examples of these enhancements which occur “behind the scenes” of Mirantis Container Cloud.
Final release of the Bare Metal provider Regional Clusters. Based on customer feedback, we revised this feature several times during its technical preview stage. We are now confident that this feature meets our customers’ expectations, and we are glad to introduce this feature at its full potential.
Change to LCM Master node removal. This allows our users to make ad-hoc replacements for failing nodes in the management cluster and thus guarantees safe, fully API-driven day 2 maintenance operations.
Updates to how we manage certificates.We have updated certificate rotation mechanisms on KeyCloak, UI Cache, Admission, IAM, etc.
Machine Pools. Machine Pools allow the ability to group machines based on their specifications in order to streamline auto-scaling or facilitate more efficient deployment practices.
As always, please refer to the release notes for more details:
We love to hear how our customers are taking advantage of the technology we deploy and what changes or enhancements you would like to see in future versions. We welcome your input so that we can continue to provide you with the best possible products and services to allow you to meet your infrastructure goals.
If you’d like to test drive MIrantis Container Cloud, you can get started here.
