What’s the point: Ansible, Puppet, Rust, Kong Mesh, etcd, and Prometheus

What’s the point: Ansible, Puppet, Rust, Kong Mesh, etcd, and Prometheus

IT automation product Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has been updated to version 1.2, which moves the tool towards better Kubernetes interoperability with features such as certified content collection, and introduces users to a private Automation Hub. 

The product also includes version 3.8 of Ansible’s enterprise version Tower, which comes bearing performance improvements, the ability to use an OAuth2 token in its credential, a way of configuring content sources on a per-organization basis, and an import/export feature for ansible.tower collections.

(Not) much ado about majors: Puppet pushes out v7.0

Ansible competitor Puppet meanwhile recently made, unnoticed to most, a version jump to v7.0. Amongst the new features are JSON termini for node and report indirection as well as for storing and loading facts as JSON if YAML isn’t an option. Users who find Puppet to take too long to load, can set the set settings_catalog to false to skip applying the settings catalog and speed up the process.

Other new additions to the automation tool include a new command, puppet facts show, as a replacement for puppet facts find to retrieve lists of facts; a new port setting type which turns a given value into an integer, and validates it if the value is in the range of 0-65535; and a public folder to facilitate non-privileged access to the last_run_summary.yaml report.

A wild Rust 1.48 appears…

The team behind Rust has stabilized version 1.48 of the programming language, which is now available to download. Nothing major has happened since the last release, however [T; N]: TryFrom<Vec<T>>, which can be used to turn a vector into an array of a given length, is now officially ready for general consumption. Documentation should have become a bit easier as well, since there’s now rustdoc syntax to let the tool know you’re trying to link to a type, as well as a way to add search aliases.

Kong Mesh catches up to Kuma

Kong Mesh, the enterprise variant of the Kuma service mesh, has been brought up to speed with the latest release of the open source project and is now on version 1.1. Apart from several multi-zone improvements, the update contains support for explicit external services and the Kafka Protocol, new flows for starting and securing data plane proxies, and better readiness checks for sidecar proxies in Kubernetes.

etcd joins ranks of CNCF graduates

Earlier this week distributed key-value store etcd was announced as the 14th project to graduate the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Etcd was originally developed at CoreOS in 2013 and joined the foundation as an incubating project in late 2018. The graduation is a  way of signaling its level of maturity which is measured by factors like adoption, feature stability, and governance process.

Prometheus 2.23 is here

Another CNCF project, monitoring system Prometheus, just celebrated another minor release by tagging version 2.23. The most obvious change is the switch to the React UI as the new default interface. Prometheus 2.23 also comes with a way to enable remote-write implementations, improvements to TSDB, and promtool enhancements to reduce unnecessary calculations and print block sizes into the tsdb list.