Platform August 2024 Release

This Northflank update introduces a range of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to improve your experience. Highlights include BYOC upgrades with GPU, Ceph and custom VPC support, expanded templates and pipelines functionality, improved networking and security options, enhanced observability, and logging capabilities, and a host of user interface improvements and bug fixes.

New Features

BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud)

• Added support for nested virtualization on BYOC GKE nodepools
• Added GKE GPU support on BYOC
• Added support for running Ceph as an alternative storage backend on BYOC
• Added support for cross-account role on AWS
• Enabled access entries on AWS BYOC clusters
• Added the ability to duplicate BYOC node pools in the UI
• Added AWS BYOC beta support for Amazon Linux 2023
• Added new API endpoint to return nodes in the BYOC cluster
• Improved BYOC billing UI to break down spend by clusters, CPU and memory
• Improved AWS BYOC permission check based on enabled features
• Improved handling for AWS BYOC creation when using custom VPCs
• Added support for Bring your own Addons (beta) allowing to install any helm chart on BYOC clusters
• Added additional permission requirements and checks for AWS BYOC
• Improved handling of AWS BYOC with regards to custom VPCs
• Ensure GPU node labels have consistent formatting in BYOC

Templates and Pipelines

• Implemented template drafts
• Added 'skip node' functionality to template editor UI
• Added the ability to override preview environment template trigger variables when running manually
• Improved template creation UI:
  • Added progress tracker for improved status visibility
  • More obvious template name field
  • Better visibility around project inheritance and template errors

Networking and Security

• Added support for hard-coded DNS entries via /etc/hosts in services/jobs/builds
• Added ability to configure port security matching certain paths (SSO, Header-based Authentication, IP Policies)
• Added enhanced support for CIDR blocks in the network security proxy
• Added support for enabling skipping security proxy if endpoint requested within the same cluster or project

Observability and Logging

• Added audit log support to the platform
• Implemented audit logging
• Added the ability to configure batching options for HTTP log sinks (maximum number of logs per request, maximum size per request)
• Added new observe page for resources for greatly enhanced container, deployment overview and performance monitoring

Authentication and Access Control

• Added support for newer self-hosted GitLab application tokens
• API roles can now be created on an organisation level, which are inherited by selected teams and Directory Sync roles
• Added an option to organisations to allow SSO with emails from external domains

Storage and Databases

• Released support for new addon versions:
  • PostgreSQL 16 (major)
  • MySQL: 8.4 (LTS), 9.0 (major)
  • MongoDB: 7.0.12
  • RabbitMQ: 3.13.3 (major), 3.12.14
• PostgreSQL addons now support installing the pg_uuidv7 extension

Integrations

• Added native support for AWS ECR with automatic docker pull secret refresh

User Interface Improvements

• Expanded template editor node code editor to full viewport height
• Improved visibility of preview environment template run status & status history
• Improved visual presentation of Git triggers in release flows
• Implemented custom plan builder enabling teams to self-service a custom plan with Northflank vs Kubernetes modes
• Added links to billing items for easier navigation to resources
• Improved tag selection UI
• Added UI for creation of API roles for organisations

Enhancements

Performance and Stability

• Improved performance of GitOps calls for faster template saving
• Improved MongoDB addon disk restore performance for volumes which support disk cloning
• Upgraded Istio to 1.22
• Improved secret injector handling to reduce unexpected zombie processes in addons

User Experience

• Improved display of run status on templates list
• Pipeline creation - resource selectors will remain open as you make selections
• Pre-fill GitOps file path field with default value when enabling GitOps
• Improved handling of AWS permission checks for accounts with organizational service control policies
• Improved text selection contrast for better accessibility
• Improved rendering of long commit messages in service deployment information
• Improved rendering of long names in the template and pipeline views
• Ensure relative time values (e.g. '3 minutes ago') are updated in real time across UI
• Improved the display of organisation team members, making it clearer who has access to a team due to an organisation-level role

Functionality

• Importing a version 1.0 or 1.1 template no longer resets the existing GitOps settings
• Projects can no longer be defined in preview environment template editor
• Organisation SSO users now correctly sync on user creation
• Added support for selecting a specific build stage in your dockerfile via node override
• Increase API time limit to 31 days for logs / metrics
• Added support for parsing the build name to the build ARG context
• Improved UID and GID handling with the Northflank secret injector

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the branch list on service creation sometimes failing to load
• Fixed an issue where updating a template's settings via Git would not correctly update the Northflank UI
• Fixed an issue where saving a deployment service while an external image was still verifying would not save changes
• Fixed various issues in template editor resulting from values being ${args}
• Fixed an issue where fetching a template from GitOps could overwrite unsaved changes
• Fixed metrics crash when going to all builds view
• Fixed issue with saving an addon await condition node
• Fixed issue where template project information would be unset on fetching from GitOps
• Fixed handling of default storage classes on Civo BYOC
• Fixed issue in addon form where custom database name could not be unset
• Fixed issue where 'await completion' checkbox would set incorrect value
• Fixed issue where addon connection details could sometimes not be fetched in template editor UI
• Fixed issue where subdomain paths could not be edited more than once without reloading the page
• Fixed rendering of domains in template editor UI that contain ${args} or ${refs}
• Removed forcing of lower-case on regions and clusterIds in templates
• Fixed a redirect issue with the Manage domains button on a service
• The visual editor for selecting a subdomain path now correctly references the prior nodes in the template

Other Changes

• Display 'skip node' status on each node in template editor
• Do not allow resources that belong to a preview environment to be added to pipelines in the UI
• Remove redundant description text from team & organisation lists
• Make timeout value optional in await condition template node
• Add RBAC permission checks to view roles in CLI log in flow UI
• Added certificate and CDN statuses on the subdomain GET endpoint