releases

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.

Today I released version 0.9.0 of the Choria Server along with an update to the Ruby plugin for MCollective.

This is a significant milestone release that give us full support for custom Certificate Authorities including chains of Intermediates. The Choria Provisioner supports requesting CSR’s from nodes and supplying those nodes with signed certs and you can integrate it with any CA with an API of your choosing.

We’ve also fixed some bugs, tweaked some things and generally iterated ever forward.

Back in July 2018 Puppet Inc officially announced that The Marionette Collective was being deprecated and will not be included in the future Puppet Agent releases.

This presented a problem for us as we relied on this packaging to install mcollective, services and its libraries. We would now have to do all this ourselves.

At the same time I was working on the Choria Server and giving it backward compatibility capabilities (still in progress to hit 100%) so we couldn’t support Puppet 6 on release day.

Today we published a bunch of releases and as of version 0.12.0 of the choria/choria release we support Puppet 6 out of the box.