Overview

Delivering on the promise of “Kubernetes Your Way”, Nirmata releases a whole new set of features in Release 2.6 of its enterprise Kubernetes management solution. The new features are available in both the Cloud Edition (SaaS) as well as the Private Edition (on-prem). With Release 2.6, Nirmata delivers features aimed at simplifying the developer experience for cloud-native tools, and at the same time providing more control and visibility for enterprise IT Ops teams across any infrastructure.

New Features & Enhancements

Kubernetes Certifications

For Release 2.6, Nirmata has successfully completed the official Service Provider certification for Kubernetes version 1.13.

Continuous Deployments

To allow DevOps teams to choose the CI/CD model that works best for them, Nirmata now supports four different ways of deploying and updating Kubernetes workloads:

• The Nirmata REST API
• The Nirmata Jenkins plugin (Push model)
• Integration with additional CI/CD tools like CircleCI.
• GitOps workflow (Push model)

You can watch the following webinar to see the Jenkins plugin in action: Enterprise-Wide Kubernetes: Automated Continuous Delivery to Kubernetes

You can read the following blog post to understand the CircleCI integration: Increase your Development Velocity with Nirmata and CircleCI

You can read the following blog post to learn the GitOps workflow support: GitOps Workflow using Kubernetes & Nirmata

Kubernetes Backup & Disaster Recovery

Now you can backup up your applications and clusters to any clouds of your choice. User can configure cluster & workload backups using the popular Velero add-on. Backups can be performed on-demand or can be scheduled. Backups can be stored in the cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP). Users can choose to back up all the Namespaces and workloads in their clusters, or they can select individual namespaces that they want to back up.

Synchronization of Existing Namespaces

One of the key requirements from our customers was the ability to provide visibility and manageability of services and workloads on existing clusters. With Nirmata, they can sync-up application manifests and cluster services and manage them right from Nirmata UI. They can then clone those applications or build a single central repository of applications manifests in the Nirmata Catalog. Nirmata users can select un-managed Namespaces (i.e Namespaces that are not deployed through Nirmata), to make them part of their environments. Users can then start managing these Namespaces as any regular application deployed through Nirmata.

Jira Integration

Customers want to track application changes as they happen in their environment. With the Jira integration, any application changes will automatically open tickets and log all the necessary changes introduced in the cluster. Users can associate a specific environment to a Jira project. When a user accepts changes for a running workload, a Jira ticket is opened to track the details of the changes. Details include the identity of the user who accepted the change, the date and the YAML describing the change. This integration is applicable to changes coming from any upstream: Application catalog, Jenkins, or Git repository.

Registry Password Changes

When a Nirmata user changes the credentials of an Image Registry, the credentials are updated in all the pull image secrets referencing this registry. Existing workloads are not impacted. The change takes effect upon pod restart or pod creation.

User Interface Improvements

Network Policy Re-Design
Kubernetes Network Policies are powerful but they are also complex constructs. We have re-designed the User Interface to provide an intuitive way of defining your Network Policies. Users don’t have to be Kubernetes experts to be able to express precisely the Network Policies applicable to their workloads. You can watch the following webinar to see this feature in action: Enterprise Wide Kubernetes: Network Policies

Catalog Inline Editor
An inline YAML editor has been added to the application catalog. Power users can now directly edit the YAML of their workload definitions. Non-expert users can continue to use guided workflows to help then define their workloads.

Cluster Creation Progress
The deployment of a cluster is a lengthy and complex operation. A progress panel has been added to provides detailed feedback to all of the operations performed by Nirmata to deploy the cluster. The tasks are divided into 4 main categories: pre-deployment checks, deployment, cluster verification.

Application Level Audit Trail
An audit trail panel has been added to each catalog application and to each running application. Users can quickly see the activity related to a particular application.

Alarm Panel Refactoring
Alarms are now grouped under 3 categories: Application, Cluster and Kubernetes Insights

Cluster Panel Re-factoring
The cluster panel has been refactored to provide faster access to the information. The cluster information is now organized into three tabs: Overview, resources, and add-ons.

Nirmata Admin CLI (nadm)

For Nirmata Private Edition, nadm provides a single command install for single node or high-availability cluster configurations for Nirmata PE. This includes the base cluster creation, certificate management, and the necessary Nirmata application configuration.

Test drive Nirmata

Trying Nirmata is easy and free! Just sign up online at https://nirmata.io.  We would love to hear your thoughts on the new features and your enterprise Kubernetes needs.