October 2024 Summaries

Replicated has announced the addition of air-gapped Helm installation support, enhancing its platform's capabilities for self-hosted customer environments. This feature offers independent software vendors (ISVs) greater flexibility in addressing customers' air gap requirements, which traditionally involved networks physically isolated from the internet but now also cater to environments needing heightened security and control with temporary internet access. The announcement includes a walkthrough by Chuck D'Antonio, Director of Solutions Engineering, demonstrating the setup of air gap support in Replicated-enabled Helm charts. The process involves logging into the Replicated portal, downloading necessary images to a local registry, tagging and pushing them to a secure network, and utilizing preflight checks before installation. The Replicated SDK functions as expected within this environment, ensuring that telemetry and custom metrics are gathered securely. For further information, users are encouraged to contact Chuck or explore documentation and demos available through Replicated.

The Commercial Software Distribution Handbook, announced by Replicated, serves as a comprehensive guide for companies aiming to distribute enterprise software in self-hosted environments. It outlines the key stages of the Commercial Software Distribution Lifecycle, which draws inspiration from the DevOps lifecycle and the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), to ensure secure and reliable software delivery to customer-controlled environments. The handbook emphasizes the importance of considering distribution needs during the software development phase, advocating for resilience, portability, open standards, and adherence to the principle of least privilege. These practices enable enterprise customers to customize installations and integrate software within their unique infrastructures without being constrained by the application's architecture, thus offering flexibility and structure regardless of their experience with self-hosted applications.

Replicated's October 2024 release introduces a range of updates across its products, enhancing ease of use and compatibility with various systems. Notably, the Compatibility Matrix now allows vendors to create clusters with pre-selected Kubernetes distributions and versions based on support bundles, and introduces multi-node support for Embedded Clusters. The update also expands Kubernetes version support to 1.31 and adds new EKS instance types. Additional features include improved documentation for the Embedded Cluster installation process, including the ability to specify ports for services, select network interfaces, and support installations behind MITM proxies. KOTS now allows for annotations and labels on Pods, and also supports MITM proxy installations. kURL sees added support for newer operating systems like Amazon Linux 2023 and Ubuntu 24.04, while the Replicated SDK now automatically trusts CA certificates during installation. The Vendor Portal is updated to support larger air gap bundles and customizable customer portal passwords. Enhanced documentation provides better guidance on RBAC policies for CI workflows and Embedded Cluster installation, complete with visual diagrams and a new topic on generating host support bundles.