What’s new in Ozone?(Jan 2022)

We’re just in the 1st week of this year and the notes for the latest release – 1.1.3 is out! This time, we have focused on streamlining day-2 ops for our users along with the usual fixes and improvements based on our user feedback.

Rollbacks are key to ensuring the high availabilities of applications even in cases of failed deployments. The new version has streamlined how rollbacks are initiated, along with adding a new feature for archiving clusters. It also supports cluster heartbeat mechanisms to understand when a cluster is offline. Following this, Ozone now features periodic cluster backups and restores as well.

Apart from other general fixes and improvements, you can now use your GitHub and GitLab accounts and log in to Ozone. All the details on this new release are as below:

New feature updates and how they positively impact your day-2 ops:

1. Rollback Deployments: The Rollback Deployment option lets you rollback your application to the last successful deployment. This helps in quick and safe recovery from a failed deployment without drastically affecting application availability.

To perform a rollback you would need pipeline execution permissions which would be available for user roles from and above a pipeline executive.

In this new release, every application pipeline can have a rollback pipeline associated with it, should things go awry. All you have to do is initiate the rollback pipeline and let things come back to how they were before. Here’s how you do it:

• From Ozone’s dashboard, navigate to ‘Pipelines and Tasks’
• From the pipelines screen, select the GUI-editor (for configuring pipelines without code: drag and drop pre-defined tasks)
• Once you enter a pipeline name in the GUI editor, select the relevant rollback pipeline from the dropdown list
• Select a task from the in-built task templates to build your pipeline and click on save. All done!

Here’s a video walkthrough of the same: https://youtu.be/ODzUtXMZYNo

2. Cluster heartbeat mechanism: Cluster heartbeats are signals sent by a cluster to communicate that it is online and available. Lack of a signal would inevitably mean that the cluster is down. In this new release of Ozone, the platform recognizes these signals which in turn gives you the insight to plan for cluster archival accordingly.

3. Cluster archival: Running instances on external cloud vendors is always tricky. For one, you never know when there could be outages or you may need to plan your deployments based on them being deleted externally by any cloud provider.

Ozone now identifies and archives your clusters if they aren’t available which typically happens when they are deleted by the cloud provider externally.

4. Backups and Restores: Day-2 ops can get complicated and lead to large overheads. You need a platform that can help you streamline these tasks rather than adding to them. Backups and restores are a key part to your everyday operations and this new release supports configuring of a periodic automated backup. You can then restore to any Kubernetes cluster later on.

Enhancements and Integrations for Enriched Usability:

1. Login with GitLab and GitHub for SaaS editions: Be it for a free trial or onboarding your team onto the platform, Ozone supports logins with your GitHub and GitLab accounts. All you need to do is to acknowledge the following access:

• Read the authenticated user’s personal information
• Grants read-only access to the authenticated user’s profile through the /user API endpoint, which includes username, public email, and full name. Also grants access to read-only API endpoints under /users.
• Allows read-only access to the user’s personal information using OpenID Connect
• Grants read-only access to the user’s profile data using OpenID Connect.
• Allows read-only access to the repository
• Grants read-only access to repositories on private projects using Git-over-HTTP or the Repository Files API.
• Allows read-only access to the user’s primary email address using OpenID Connect
• Grants read-only access to the user’s primary email address using OpenID Connect.
• Access the authenticated user’s API
• Grants complete read/write access to the API, including all groups and projects, the container registry, and the package registry.

2. New user onboarding flow: Since the user base is now growing to multiple first-time users, we have added an onboarding flow that guides users right from the dashboard. A guided tour helps users create or attach their clusters, integrate tools, configure pipelines, onboard applications, and deploy and monitor them on Ozone.

Watch this space for more product updates!

To know more about how Ozone can help your enterprise, book a demo today!