It’s that time again
Can you believe it was way back in October that we announced Palette 4.5?
Since then we may have had the holiday season, but our engineers kept building. And now it’s time to meet Palette 4.6, rolling up a host of features and enhancements.
For all the details, check out our release notes, or keep reading for the key highlights.
If you’re new to Palette, or if you haven’t checked us out for a while — now might be a good time to click that button at the top of the page and book in for a live demo so you can see all this goodness in action.
In case you missed it…
Some of the biggest headline features in 4.6 we have already covered elsewhere (sorry, we just couldn’t help ourselves):
VM Migration Assistant
Picture the scene: you want to start using KubeVirt, but you have hundreds of VMs on vSphere. How do you migrate them? Our new VM Migration Assistant, based on the upstream Konveyor Forklift project, provides a web-based user interface for seamless and intuitive VM and OVA migrations. Delivered as a ready-to-use pack, it simplifies both cold and warm migrations, minimizes downtime, and supports efficient mass migrations with minimal learning curves.
Learn more about migrating VMs to KubeVirt in our blog.
Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes support
Back in December, we were a launch partner for Amazon’s new EKS Hybrid Nodes product. Hybrid Nodes enables you to run a single EKS cluster with a managed control plane in the public cloud, while using on-prem machines as worker nodes.
This abstracts away complexity, thus simplifying networking across environments for end customers, reducing redundant control plane costs. Given the centralized control plane, disaster recovery for business workloads can also be directly orchestrated by Kubernetes.
Palette builds on top of EKS Hybrid Nodes by providing a secure and repeatable workflow to provision edge nodes and bring them under the management of an EKS cluster as hybrid nodes to support production scale.
Learn more about our Hybrid Nodes story here.
Cluster profile variables, now not just for edge!
We introduced Cluster Profile variables back in Palette 4.3 with our Local UI interface, as a way to reduce risk and time spent on field engineering visits to edge Kubernetes environments. Instead of field engineers manually typing values like IP addresses across complex YAML files, each value would be defined once and reused across the configurations that need it.
This feature was a big hit, so much so that we’ve now brought it to all kinds of clusters, not just edge. Platform engineers can now use variables to define and update cluster settings much more quickly and safely, without tedious and error prone retyping. You’ll benefit from neat features like validation of entered values, too.
Updates to validated packs and baked in components
Many of our users love how Palette offers them out of the box support for all kinds of different cloud native software, including different K8s distributions, which we validate and support.
In Palette 4.6 we’ve added a long list of new supported versions of K3s, RKE2, MicroK8s, Calico, Kong, Nvidia GPU Operator, OPA, Longhorn and many more.
We’ve also updated some of the open source components that power Palette’s native features, like our Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO). That’s now underpinned by version 1.4.0 of upstream KubeVirt.
Lastly, a big update to our Terraform provider now enables administrators to programmatically import, create and manage users, roles, PCG DNS mappings and SSH keys, meaning IaC workflows can now be more powerful without forcing the user to drop out to work via the Palette UI or API.
Edge leadership
Two-node HA now in tech preview
We presented this cutting edge concept at KubeCon when it was fresh from our labs. Now with Palette 4.6 it’s ready in our core product with no tinkering or prayers to the demo gods required!
If you’re looking for a degree of hardware high availability for your edge sites, but can’t justify the budget for three or more nodes per site, our two-node HA solution might be the perfect alternative.
You can enable this feature by toggling the high availability mode during cluster configuration. In HA mode, etcd is replaced with Postgres and Kine. Refer to the Two-Node Architecture page for further details.
Local to central attach
We introduced Local UI and local management for customers that couldn’t or wouldn’t administer their edge clusters from Palette’s central management interface. But until now, if you built a cluster in local mode, it had to stay in local mode for its full lifespan.
With Palette 4.6, we now support attaching a locally managed cluster to a Palette instance. This enables customers to flexibly transition clusters to central management in cases where they no longer need to utilize Local UI, or as part of a business-mandated onboarding process.
Multi proxy support
Although rare, some customers need to support multiple proxies at their edge sites. Now, Palette supports supplying multiple proxy certificates and configurations. It’s niche features like this that show Palette’s maturity for real enterprise use cases.
Edge virtual clusters on appliance mode cluster groups
Virtual clusters (vCluster) are a fantastic technology: they let you run multiple lightweight K8s clusters inside a host Kubernetes cluster.
Virtual Clusters need to be deployed on a cluster group, and until now, you could only create cluster groups from clusters that Palette had built via Cluster API. If you preferred to build clusters using our Appliance Mode, based on Kairos and usually used for edge, you were out of luck.
In this release, we now allow edge cluster groups so they can be used for Virtual Clusters.
UI customization
We’re proud of all the different kinds of organizations that have chosen to adopt Palette, and all the different creative ways they bake it into their business.
It’s not just end user platform teams that manage their clusters with Palette: we’re used by ISVs, multinational hardware vendors, managed service providers (MSPs) and group IT teams serving multiple business units.
Many of these businesses want to apply their own branding to the Palette experience so they can deliver it to their own internal users, customers and partners. So as of Palette 4.6, we’re now offering global UI customization that lets these organizations ‘white label’ Palette.
This includes custom login screens, logos and color schemes all customizable from a self-service admin UI. The feature is available for both Palette and Palette VerteX, in self-hosted deployments.
Maturity and innovation
As always, take a tour through the release notes to see what the full payload has to offer. There’s plenty of new capabilities, and many enhancements that raise the bar for security, robustness and ease of use.
Stay tuned for more updates throughout the year — we have a lot of exciting news planned.