Release notes for March
2022

It’s already the end of Q1 2022, and our teams have been busy ensuring this latest version of the release makes up for our customer demands and also ensures Ozone is competitively placed against top DevOps delivery platforms.

The prime focus in this combined release of 1.1.5 and 1.1.6 has been on improving the agility of the platform with the lowest possible wait times/latencies and efficient resource utilizations. Few changes also include modifications in the pipeline workflows that help navigate around roadblocks to ensure quick deployments across environments and improvements in specific features that allow for improved team collaborations. Try out the latest release now!
Details follow:

New features to help you zoom through your deployments:

• Automated build tagging through pipelines: Code commits that happen through various ways, like automated schedules for example, have branch and commit IDs tagged to the image to add a better context to DevOps teams. This image-level tagging, especially during releases are of a great help during rollbacks which provide for better clarity as to the source of commit and for corrective measures.

• Performance enhancements with NATS: Neural Autonomic Transport System, or NATS, is an open-source messaging middleware written in Golang. It is used for secure communications across any combination of cloud vendors or on-prem servers and devices. More importantly, NATS being lightweight, the efficient resource utilizations help enhance the platform’s performance.

This helps in streamlining on-prem installations as it reduces the compute requirements per node, which in turn leads to a smaller control pane cluster. This in turn aides in better capacity planning.

• Response caching: For better performance and shorter latencies, API responses between the front-end and the back-end are cached for faster communications.

• Environments mapping to clusters: It’s imperative to follow best practices for not just achieving lightning-fast deployments, but also to instill a sense of security and governance across your teams. Mapping environments against clusters is one such best practice that helps prevent accidental push of images meant for other clusters into a wrong one. This helps in better segregation of clusters and improves visibility across teams for better collaborations.

• Infrastructure provisioning through Ansible: Support for Ansible now comes native on Ozone. You can call IaaC before the build in your pipelines and it would then be recognized as an instance of Ansible. Ozone comes with reusable Ansible IaaC scripts which can be used within any delivery workflow (creating infrastructure, running pipelines on them, clearing the infrastructure and many more).

Login with Azure AD B2C: Azure Active Directory is a business-to-customer identity as a service. It helps developers use any of their preferred identity provider accounts like Amazon, Microsoft, etc to authenticate themselves and login to any application. With this, login for Ozone’s Sandbox is now much more streamlined and secure. Try out our sandbox now!

• User Invites: Admins can invite other users and team members to their Ozone accounts via e-Mail, thus helping collaborations across teams and projects.

Enhancements and integrations for enriched usability:

• Clusters come with contextual links for easier navigation and can help in direct observations rather than navigating to a different screen with unnecessary clicks
• Earlier, admins faced accidental lockouts from their accounts. A static role for admins is now implemented to prevent such occurrences
• To promote Ozone amongst the developer communities, individual developers can now sync their own personal repositories of GitLab instances along with support for organization-owned repositories as well.
• Pipelines can tend to run in a loop or get stuck indefinitely which may require a manual intervention to reset or abort the pipeline run. However, by specifying custom timeouts for every individual pipeline, this situation can be effectively tackled long with pushing out an alert for whenever this occurs.
• All variables are now injected by default into pipelines as a best practice for CI/CD governance.

Get early access of this release by signing up today: https://ozone.one/sign-up