releases

Yesterday I introduced a new Choria component called Scout which helps you build scalable monitoring pipelines. Today, we’ll look a bit at what makes a Scout install and how it is built.

In a follow up post I’ll dive a bit into Autonomous Agents - an infrequently used but very powerful building block found in Choria.

Overview

We’re happy to announce a new project called Choria Scout - a highly scalable system health monitoring framework and monitoring data pipeline released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Initially we support the ability to execute Nagios compatible plugins on Choria managed nodes with results sent centrally in a standard CloudEvents format, and optionally, integrated into Prometheus.

These are framework level building blocks that will in time be used to create a full monitoring stack built on Choria technologies. Checks and value overrides can already be configured using our Puppet modules. You can also use these building blocks to build entirely custom solutions for your own needs.

Scout will be a cloud native project with central components capable of being hosted on Kubernetes and using data formats supported by commercial clouds and projects like KNative. It will have a focus on integration, open data exchange and extensibility.

Despite being cloud native we will of course support monitoring anything where Choria, or the upcoming Scout agent, can run which includes traditional baremetal, VMs, containers and pods and small devices.

We have quite a significant release of the Choria Server today that lays ground work for an upcoming Choria monitoring pipeline.

Read the full post for the details.

It’s been quite some time since we’ve had releases and there’s been a huge list of small improvements.

Thanks to those who contributed to these releases: David Gardner, Mark Frost, Romain Tartière, Yury Bushmelev, @rjd1, Tim Meusel, Alexander Hermes, Vincent Janelle

It’s been a while since we had release announcements and it’s been a surprisingly busy period.

The main focus here has been on a number of stability and bug fixes, we’ve had some users dig in really deep into various aspects of the system and a number of bugs were squashed.

Past the quality of life stuff I have started reworking Choria Server Provisioning which will set us on a path to having a good Puppet free story, I have some POCs lying around of a Kubernetes based Broker, CA, and Provisioner that will give a really smooth path forward - provisioning is now compiled in to the FOSS stack by default and can be enabled using a JWT token, more on that in a future post.

We also include a Tech Preview of NATS JetStream support and significantly moved our event formats over to Cloud Events v1.0 format.

Thanks especially go to Alexander Hermes for his deep dive into all aspects of the client side playbooks. Deep dives into a product and filing some tickets, discussing the model on slack etc it hugely time consuming and very often this kind of community contribution flies under the radar but I find it more valuable than code, huge props to Alexander.

Other shout outs to Ben Robert, Yury Bushmelev, Romain Tartière and Vincent Janelle

Today I have a small few bug fixes to ship, these will affect only people who are experimenting or using our newly announced External Agents support, others can safely ignore this.

Thanks to Ben Roberts for his assistance with these releases

Today we are doing a series of long overdue Puppet Module releases as well as a reasonably significant Choria Server update.

Significantly this delivers the new External Agents I blogged about recently.

Read on for all the details!

The next releases will start coming in over the next week or three, we’re getting going with quite a major release for the Choria Server and Broker and a few related packages, I’ll introduce some of the changes here today.

Choria Release 0.12.0 is available today, you can get it by updating your Hiera data choria::version.

This months releases come a bit late as things have been moving slow while I worked on a major new feature called Choria Autonomous Agents which releases in MVP today.

Keep an eye out for a follow up blog post that details those. Apart from that it’s just general house keeping releases.

One thing is worth pointing out: This is the last release of Choria modules that support Puppet prior to version 6

I typically release around the 20th of the month, this one was a bit delayed while I worked with the NATS project on some problems we encountered. Nothing major in these releases as I have been traveling and working on a large implementation.

Some work that is not mentioned here is that I am reworking my Choria network load tester tool, this essentially allow you to use lets say 20 AWS instances to run a Choria network of 15 000 nodes. It does this by starting multiple Choria Servers on a single node in Go routines and connecting them to the network in various formations. This is ongoing, reach out to me if anyone has interest in this tool. This focus is mainly to assist me in testing the upcoming NATS 2.0 release for uptake into the Choria Broker.

For Puppet users there is a potential big change to look out for, Choria has a stated goal of:

Choria sets up the popular Action Policy based authorization and does so in a default deny mode which means by default, no-one can make any requests

There was a problem though in that any modules that had no explicit policies would end up being in default allow mode, this addressed across a few of these updates so you might need to keep an eye on this in your environment.

Special thanks to Romain Tartière and Konrad Scherer for their contributions during this cycle.