We are super excited to announce the release of Nirmata 2.4. This release is packed with features that simplify Kubernetes cluster operations and workload management. In this post, I will highlight the key features. For full list of features and improvements, please check the release notes.

Resource Quotas and Limits

In a shared Kubernetes cluster, it is necessary to ensure that teams are not using more than the allocated share of the cluster. Resource Quotas allow cluster administrators to address this concern. Prior to enabling resource quotas for a namespace, administrators need to configure Limit Range to restrict the maximum or minimum size of some of the resources in order to prevent users from requesting unreasonably high or low values for commonly reserved resources like memory, or to provide default limits when none are specified.

In this release, there is full support for Resource Quotas and Limit Ranges. You can configure Resource Quotas and Limit Ranges for each environment. For environments with isolation type configured as “Namespace per Application”, you can configure the quotas and limit ranges for each application as well.

You can also view all the configured requests and limits for each pod in the cluster as well as on each node.

Cluster AutoSync

Nirmata makes deploying applications really easy but till now any changes made directly to the Kubernetes cluster were not reflected in Nirmata causing a discrepancy. Now, with the new Cluster AutoSync feature, Nirmata automatically synchronizes any changes made to the cluster, ensuring that the resources are always up to date. In addition, you can also view the changes that were synchronized.

Vault Secrets Management

Nirmata now integrates with Vault to provide comprehensive Kubernetes secrets management. Administrator can configure the Vault server information in Nirmata along with the list of secrets that need to be retrieved and managed. At runtime, secrets will be loaded by an init containers before the application container starts. These secrets are written to a file. The application container run command can “source” this file to make the secrets available as environment variables. Alternatively, the application container can read / load the file. 

UX Improvements

As always, there are several UX improvements in this release. Here are some of the key features:

• Help Text – Get context sensitive help for any Kubernetes resource directly from the dialog or wizard.
• Flexible layout – In addition to card layout, you can switch to table layout, if needed. Table layout is more compact and can be useful if you have lots of entries.
• Nirmata Product Tour – Take a quick tour of Nirmata and familiarize yourself with the features and terminology.

Kubernetes Certification

Nirmata release 2.4 is certified for Kubernetes 1.11 and 1.12.

Besides the above features, there are several minor enhancements and fixes in this release. Check out the release notes. To try out this release, sign up for a free trial at https://try.nirmata.io or reach out to us, if you are interested in a demo.