Palette 2.7 brings hot new features for every Kubernetes user

We’re excited to announce Palette 2.7! That’s right: the best Kubernetes management platform is now even better than ever… and you don't have to do a thing to start enjoying the enhancements. Our SaaS model means every new feature is at your fingertips today (and if you’re one of our on-prem customers, we're standing by to help you get on to the latest version, too).

What goodies have we put in your basket? Let's take a look:

So much Azure love

If you’re a Microsoft house, this section is for you.

For starters, we've enabled Windows worker nodes on Azure Kubernetes Service, so you can now run Windows containers through Palette.

In another win for open source, Spectro Cloud developers added auto scaling support to Microsoft's Cluster API provider for Azure Kubernetes Service. Combined with some UX magic in Palette, we now have the ability to enable auto scaling on AKS clusters with the flip of a toggle, so your Palette-managed AKS clusters can resize automatically to meet the demand on your cluster.

And as of Palette 2.7 you now have fine-grained control over network traffic into and out of your pods; our Azure CNI Pack can now optionally use Calico Policies for AKS clusters.

Private Cloud Gateway availability levels up

Our Private Cloud Gateway (PCG) bridges between your data centers and our management SaaS, or to your on-premise deployments of Palette.

Now in Palette 2.7, our most recent update to the PCG enables migration of cluster traffic from an unhealthy PCG instance to a healthy one with the click of a button in our UI wizard, minimizing downtime.

Workspaces get even more flexible

Workspaces are a construct within Palette that let you manage resources uniformly across many clusters. With 2.7, we've added the ability for Workspaces to manage Resource Quotas (CPU and memory limits), so you can control the size of your workloads across clusters.

But that’s not all. Users with the Workspace Operator role can now take backups and do selective restores of the objects in their Workspace, including cluster resources and data on persistent volumes. You can also schedule regular backups and rest easy knowing your data is safe in a Google Cloud Storage, Minio or Amazon S3 bucket.

You can now use regular expressions to more easily assign role bindings that are managed via Workspaces.

We have also added the ability to prevent specific container images from running in a Workspace — simply add the container image to the Restricted Images list in the Workspace settings and you won’t have to worry about accidental deployments.

Bring your Canonical Ubuntu Advantage subscription

Continuing our broad and deep support for Canonical offerings (check out how much we love MAAS for bare metal here!, we now support using Canonical's Ubuntu Advantage subscription with our OS packs to ensure your cluster's operating system has the most recent and relevant updates. Ubuntu Advantage brings Livepatch, Common Criteria EAL2, FIPS 140-2 Level 1 certified crypto modules and Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical to your OS layer.

Deploy CSI, CNI layers from Helm charts

Until now, we have required that Container Storage Interface (CSI) and Container Networking Interface (CNI) layers have our Pack metadata; now, you can deploy a CSI or CNI layer directly from its Helm chart.

Pretty colors!

We don’t like to brag, but our user interface has always stood head and shoulders above our competition. With Palette 2.7, we've extended our UI to use colors to show the state of your pack deployments: https://docs.spectrocloud.com/clusters/cluster-management/pack-monitoring/#packmonitoring.

We've also added the ability to view Role Bindings and Cluster Role Binding objects on your clusters directly within the UI.

We’re always innovating

These are just the new features and enhancements from this month’s release — and it’s our fifth release of 2022 already. At Spectro Cloud we’re always working hard to improve Palette, listening to feedback from customers like you.

You can always find the latest version release notes at https://docs.spectrocloud.com/release-notes/

Want to try out these features for yourself? With Palette free tier you can access all the features of our Kubernetes management platform, with no time restrictions and no credit card required. Get started here.