SUSE Stratos Console 3.0 & 3.1 | SUSE Communities

SUSE Stratos Console 3.0 & 3.1

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SUSE Stratos Console 3.0 was released a little over a month ago without the fanfare it absolutely deserves. Now the 3.1 release which will be part of Cloud Application Platform 2.0 has just been released, so let’s go over some of the great work the Stratos team has done over the last few months for both releases.

Stratos 3 with Helm 3

One of the big work items for Stratos 3.0 was the switch from Helm 2 to Helm 3. This change eliminates the need to run the “tiller” pod as an in-cluster component for managing deployments. This major change in Helm architecture improves the security model, as access control is now constrained to the credentials of the Kubernetes user rather than assigning permissions to a component running in the cluster.

With this change, Helm support in Stratos moves from technology preview to a fully supported feature in Cloud Application Platform.

Workloads view

There’s now a new top-level Workloads view showing pods, related services, and deployment metadata.

Stratos Console Workloads view in SUSE Stratos Console

Workloads view showing Kubernetes deployments

The new view makes it easier to inspect applications deployed to Kubernetes and see what settings they were deployed with. Clicking on any pod in Kubernetes opens a side panel showing all its properties and a link to metrics views for memory and CPU usage over time.

Deploy Docker/OCI images to Cloud Foundry

Deploying container images to Cloud Foundry has long been part of the API and CLI. Now Stratos Console users can deploy applications packaged as OCI images directly from the Applications view by specifying an image from Docker Hub or other public OCI registries.

Deploy Docker/OCI images to CF

Deploy Docker/OCI images to CF

Improvements and fixes

Other changes fall into the category of general usability improvements and good housekeeping.

  • The events stream can now be viewed per CF endpoint, Organization or Space, making it easier to see activity at various scopes.
  • Stratos Console can now be deployed without UAA by setting up a single admin user, configured during setup or via an environment variable in the Helm values. This is required for single-user environments or CaaS Platform deployments that are not running Cloud Application Platform.
  • Stratos 3 uses Angular 8, which exposes the new Differential Loading feature. This framework feature should improve performance in newer browsers while retaining support for older ones.

Stratos Console 3.1

Our latest release has some important improvements for operators running at scale.

After feedback from community partners and customers running hundreds of service plans; thousands of users and organizations; and tens of thousands of applications, service instances and routes, we made the top level entity list size configurable by the operator and given users the ability to override this. The load times have also improved when fetching large lists.

This release also includes other small but helpful improvements and fixes:

  • user roles can be added and removed via username
  • Jetstream API request logging can now be disabled
  • application deployment now supports Cloud Foundry v3 manifest features (like multiple buildpack)
  • the profile icon now supports Gravatar
  • administrators can now edit existing endpoints

Upstream releases too!

Let’s not forget that every SUSE release of Stratos Console is preceded by an upstream release in the Cloud Foundry community. The team releases core functionality and Cloud Foundry API features first, often with input from contributors such as Orange, Comcast, and Cloud.gov.

We then consume these upstream release and add features for our container and application platforms. Some of the current SUSE-specific features may end up in the upstream release eventually as that community’s interest in Kubernetes features continues to grow.

Both the Cloud Foundry and SUSE releases are open source.

Try it out

In order to encourage broad adoption, Stratos is released in a number of formats. For deployments as part of SUSE container and application platforms, we always recommend installing the official SUSE Stratos Console Helm chart as per the documentation.

But if you’re just wanting to kick the proverbial tires, we do have an All-In-One Docker image you can run locally. Let us know what you think and where you think we should take Stratos Console next.

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