Our August updates are finally here! This time, we have focused on enhancing the experience for our partners/service providers with a few optimizations to the Ozone SaaS offering. Our last release detailed the Ozone Partner Solution where we introduced the partner model to re-distribute Ozone at scale across geographies to end customers.

In this release, the team has introduced a few features, upgrades, and fixes based on user feedback that gives more flexibility and control to Ozone partners and end customers as well.

New Features and Upgrades

1. Ozone Backstage Plugin

Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals. It is an ecosystem of plugins that help make a developer’s life easier by helping build a central place for an organization’s tools, resources, and documentation. Backstage provides developers with a framework along with a wide range of plugins for integrating all their tools such as Source Code Platforms, Security (SAST & DAST) tools, and everything else outside of their repo and IDE.
In this release, Ozone provides a Backstage plugin that can be added to the Backstage instance. Basic deployments with limited support for GitHub, GitLab, Harbor, and DockerHub can be performed with Ozone as they are available for the Backstage community to be leveraged along with their existing toolchains. Other features like Ozone’s CI/CD can also be used directly from within the developer’s developer portal.

2. License-level Charges for Ozone Partner Billing

Ozone partners have more flexibility to set limits for each license and charge their end customers accordingly.
This gives flexibility and control to Ozone partners in defining their licensing policies to end users. Charges for various parameters like the number of pipelines and pipeline runs, deployments, repo and cluster onboarding, etc can be set as variables in the policies and enforced during the time of license creation.
A respective charge would then be calculated per license based on usage.

3. Version Upgrade for Vault

We have seen a version upgrade for Hashicorp Vault where the update supports “High Availability” to prevent outages. This is simply done by using multiple Vault servers and the HA mode is automatically enabled if the data store supports it.
How is this relevant to our release? As might be known to the community, Ozone leverages Hashicorp Vault to offer native secret vault/management capabilities with dynamic secret injections into pipelines. The new release also comes with this version upgrade of Hashicorp Vault to support the “High Availability” mode.

4. Improved resilience of MinIO for storage

MinIO is a popular distributed opensource storage server used for storing objects (like containers). When teams scale their pipelines to deploy hundreds of containers, the load on the Ozone’s MiniO instance increases, creating vulnerabilities for failures.
In this release, however, an under-the-hood upgrade has helped improve the resilience of Ozone’s internal MiniO for which the chances of it going down are next to zero.

5. Kubernetes operators for stateful application deployments

In keeping with the goal of achieving high deployment efficiency across your teams, Ozone has incorporated Kubernetes operators for its internal MongoDB and Postgres DB.
The Kubernetes Operator manages events of a typical lifecycle for a MongoDB/Postgres DB cluster like provisioning computing power & storage, user setup, network connection configurations, and updating these settings as and when needed.

6. Auto-route login flows

With the growing user base of Ozone and our partners, the preference of using third-party services for authentication is a natural priority. Hence, the login flows for external SSO now involves an automatic routing of the user session to the 3rd party (like G-suite for instance), where he would find himself in familiar territory during the course of completing his authentication. Post this, redirects would happen back to the Ozone dashboard, thus completing a streamlined login experience. This auto-route flow has been set as a default starting from this release.

Fixes

1. Missing pipeline runs in audit logs
   A major fix has been provided to a critical problem that was reported occasionally by our user community: That audit logs sometimes did not contain stats for all the pipeline runs. The issue is now fixed with this release. 
   
2. Optimized Azure cluster creation flows
   Ambiguities in cluster creation flows are fixed with a better UI state management. 
   
3. Fixed Grafana login issues
   Intermittent login issues were reported while trying to access the monitoring dashboard with Grafana login, which has now been addressed. 
   
4. Clipboard buttons not working for safari users
   This issue has been fixed.
   
5. Validation of the presence of account IDs on all internal DBs
   This issue has been resolved.