We are very proud to announce the availability of a brand new version of Rudder, 2.4.0~beta3.
This is the first official release in the 2.4 series, code-named Drakkar. This beta version has been a long time in the making, and I’d like to apologize to those who have been waiting for it. Your wait has not been in vain however, as this version comes fully tested and loaded with new features!
Changes
It is impossible to list every change here (check out the Redmine roadmap for that), but here is an overview of the major changes:
- Core concepts renamed for clarity – Configuration Rules, Policy Instances and Policy Templates are now Rules, Directives and Techniques
- REST API
- Basic authorization management
- Drill down information about configuration status for Rules, Directives, Components and Values is available in the UI
- New “ops log” targeted at sysadmins who need to analyze the application in production
- Inventory information now includes environment variables, running processes and virtual machines
- Nodes can now be deleted
- The Rudder server can now manage itself (the server is “just another node”)
- Rudder server now checks it’s own configuration via CFEngine (aka “eat your own dogfood”)
- All configurations (groups, Rules, Directives & Techniques) can now be exported to a local git repository, or a ZIP archive and re-imported
- A change message can be requested on each change for documentation (visible in Event Logs and as a git commit message)
- Automatic configuration deployment can be disabled to allow for manual change validation
- Groups and Directives can now be cloned
- Many UI improvements
Operating systems supported
This version also provides packages for several new operating systems:
- Rudder server: RHEL 6, Ubuntu 11.10, Ubuntu 12.04, as well as Debian 5, Debian 6 and SLES 11
- Rudder agent: all of the above as well as RHEL 5 and SLES 10
Installing, upgrading and testing
Documentation to Install and Upgrade is available online. The Download page sums up URLs. We also recommend using the Rudder Vagrant config if you want a quick and easy way to get an installation for testing.
Release notes
Please note that this beta3 version contains significantly more new features that the beta1 and beta2 versions (available on rudder-project.org but not officially announced). This decision was made to include features from another branch that were reaching maturity almost at the same time as this release was prepared. This decision is the cause for the delay in this release, and can be seen as uncommon, but we are confident about the quality of this release.
This version of Rudder is in beta status. While we have tested it thoroughly and believe it to be free of any majors bugs, use on production systems is not encouraged at this time and is at your own risk. We are however running it on our internal production system with success.
Contributors
Special thanks go out to the following individuals who invested time, patience, testing, patches or bug reports to make this version of Rudder awesome:
- Fabrice Flore-Thébault
- François Bayart aka A-Kaser (Look a box)
- Gonéri Le Bouder (Teclib)
- Jean Rémond (Savoir Faire Linux)
- Matt Ungaro
- Michael Gliwinski (Henderson Group)
- Michael Linder (Arcellor Mittal)
- Olivier Li Kiang Cheong aka lkco
- And of course the whole team at Normation who have worked through ice cold and blazing heat, mud, sweat and tears to make this happen!
We are very excited about this release and hope you will be too. We are impatient to hear your feedback, be it comments on this blog, questions on Twitter, bug reports or feature requests or even GitHub pull requests 🙂
