This is a (approximately) 2 week summary of the activity in the Rudder community, highlighting events, discussions and development activity. Writing these updates is open, all contributions are welcome in the collaborative writing space!
Announcements and Blog Posts
- There will be a Rudder room at CfgMgmtCamp (Monday, February 6)!
- Rudder 4.1 beta 1 was released (changelog). The features planned for the final release are all included, with some rough edges for now. For reference, these features include:
- A new API on all Rudder relays, allowing remote triggering of the agent and file sharing between nodes.
- Datasources, to integrate data from external APIs into Rudder policies. This feature will be available as a plugin for Rudder. We are currently improving our development and build processes for plugins, and you will likely see new Rudder plugins in the future. Why use plugins?
- They help to keep Rudder’s code base lighter and simpler
- They allow for more flexible release management, by adding or updating features without affecting the main Rudder application
- They allow installing some advanced features only when they are needed, keeping the default user interface simple
- Tags on directives and rules, to allow an easy filtering. Here is an overview of Directives filtering:
Working on a new interface to add tags to Directives and Rules – what do you think? #workinprogress pic.twitter.com/FTHqMlNeGv
— Rudder IT automation (@RudderProject) January 4, 2017
- We reached 10000 tickets on Redmine (since mid-2009, more than 7 years ago)!
- Reminder: Rudder 3.2 End-of-Life date is set to 10th Feb. 2017. You should upgrade to 4.0 soon.
Events
- [Upcoming] Rudder community will gather at the Rudder room at CfgMgmtCamp, 6 and 7 Feb., Gent (Belgium)
Development
- Work on the 4.1 release, see the beta 1 changelog for details.
- Load testing was made on 3.1 and 4.0 versions, and will lead to performance improvements in the next minor releases (#9835 and #9869).
- Packaging change in 4.1: rudder-server-relay is now a dependency of rudder-webapp. This package now does all the policy distribution and inventory collection on both root server and relay servers. It is totally transparent for users and require no specific action.
- We worked on changing the Java required version in 4.1 to Java 8 (#9917). This will lead to some minor changes in our dependencies, but we will provide the necessary package to avoid having to another repository for platforms that do not provide Java 8. This will be documented in installation documentation before the final release.
The following documentation sources were updated:
- Policy Mode documentation (with a detailed explanation of the mode computation when there are overrides)
- Documentation about inventory workflow (from the nodes to the application database)
- A more detailed documentation was added for the file_ensure_keys_values generic method
- Documentation for the new datasources feature (in 4.1)
