February 2024 Releases

After a few months break on sabbatical and other changes we’re back with some new releases.

The main focus here is Puppet 8 and Ruby 3.2 support and this has largely been a community effort which was very good to see.

While we’re moving our Puppet support forward we are also working on a future independent of Puppet. You might be aware that we have a Provisioner that can guide unconfigured Choria instances to being fully managed instances. The Provisioner though is focussed on configuration only, not on deployment of agents and other plugins.

Over the last year or so we have started designing ways to deliver Autonomous Agents at runtime, we now also support delivering External Agents in this manner. In this way by placing a manifest of agents in a Key-Value bucket Choria Server can completely deploy itself and it’s plugins. Next we’ll either turn our Ruby agents into Extenral Agents or add the same ability to Ruby agents.

This is a big milestone in being Puppet free as there are no single point that still requires Puppet to go from zero to a full Choria environment. We have a bit to go here, but it’s conceivable that we might switch our standard deploy to start using these mechanisms to deploy plugins and configure Choria.

In the end we will still support a Puppet deployment method but it will become much simpler as we will only need to do a small part of the overall heavy lifting using Puppet. We will also unlock full featured environments backed by Kubernetes and other hosting environments.

Thanks to Jeff McCune, Pieter Loubser, Trey Dockendorf, Ryan Dill, Mark Dechiaro and Romain Tartière, Vincent Janelle for their support in making these releases possible.

Choria Server version 0.28.0

Links: Changes, Release

Enhancements

Allow clients to view the ACLs applied to their connections in various utilities
Allow setting SRV domain using the CHORIA_SRV_DOMAIN environment variable
Adds additional utilities to maintain autonomous agent plugin manifests under choria machine plugins
Upgrade to NATS Server 2.10.x and updates the embedded nats command line
Various improvements to audit logging and expose its settings in choria tool config
Allow audit log ownership to be set using plugin.rpcaudit.logfile.group and plugin.rpcaudit.logfile.mode
Allow those who embed Choria Server to get notified when it’s ready using RegisterReadyCallback()
Support verifying packed plugin specifications in machine pugins and mms
Ensure stream users can access KV and Object stores
Expose the client governor permission on the jwt cli
Support using in-process connections for adapter communications
Only validate ed25519 signed provisioner tokens using the Issuer flow, fall back for rsa signed tokens
Adds a new plugins watcher that can manage auto agents and external rpc agents
Support booleans, enums and more in the rpc builder command flags parsing
Use a native sha256 checker rather than rely on OS provided binary in the archive watcher
Support runtime reloading and relocation of external agents without restarting the server

Bug Fixes

Improve shutdown reliability by giving Stream brokers more shutdown grace
Disable appbuilder on Windows
Retry calls to streams that can fail in early election setup
Timeout initial connection attempts while preparing embedded nats CLI connection
Grant access to governor lifecycle events for clients with the governor permission
Trim spaces in received kv data in order to determine if it’s JSON data or not