Nov - 2021

The team at Ozone strives to make the platform as powerful and simple to use as possible. In the latest release, we focus on simplifying key aspects of Continuous Delivery with Ozone.

It is now super easy to automate Canary Deployments across multiple clouds. You will also see the addition of a Realtime Pipeline Logger which, along with many others, can help in debugging your pipelines and tasks. We have revamped our dashboards as well to provide task and pipeline-level insights. The base has now been set to bring in application-level insights and ML-based automation in future releases!

In a bid to provide higher security and improve flexibility, a few gateway & repository integrations are now live. These and a few other enhancements to our existing capabilities help drive superior user experience and insights. This version is available for both on-premise and cloud installations.

Highlighted below are the latest release notes for the Ozone CI/CD platform as of Oct 2021 – Release 1.1.2:

Feature Upgrades that Impact How You Deploy:

1. Canary as a Pipeline: Setting up Canary Deployments can become overly manual and complicated. Aspects like managing replica counts, configuring load balancers to partition users, and monitoring the environments demand a lot of resources and administrative overheads.

However, with Ozone’s modular Tekton pipelines, you can simply drag and drop a Canary Deployment task (which is pre-configured) as a step within the pipeline. This lets you deploy to any environment seamlessly across hybrid or multi-clouds based on your use case. It helps you bring Canary as one of the few steps in the CD pipeline and saves time by removing the need for manual configurations with its templated approach. Apart from Ozone’s Canary, there are 100+ tasks and events that are available out-of-the-box as templates that can be used to build a pipeline with just a few clicks.

2. Realtime Pipeline Logger: Ozone lets you trigger and work with multiple pipelines, all in one place. Likewise, all pipeline logs can be accessed from Ozone itself. In this new release, the pipeline run logs are streamed using web sockets. This enhances user experience by removing the necessity to reload the logs manually and can also be a strong reference point for debugging pipelines and tasks in real-time.

3. CI/CD Dashboards: Multiple Tasks are available as templates that can be added to a pipeline within a few clicks. However, once a pipeline or a task is run, the same simplicity is offered to get the status for these runs. Status charts and durations for pipeline runs and task runs are now available on Ozone within 7 days along with the output status as well.

Enhancements and Integrations for Enriched Usability:

1. GitLab and BitBucket: An end-to-end CI/CD platform ideally needs to act as a single point of control for all your DevOps orchestrations. Code repositories being the sources, need to be integrated with the platform on the pipeline level. You can automate pipeline triggers from your codebase by setting up webhooks in Ozone pipelines. Just connect your GitLab and BitBucket repositories on Ozone with native webhook integrations which then allows for automated triggers of pipelines and releases.

2. Harbor Registry: VMware’s Harbor Registry extends the open-source Docker Distribution by adding the functionalities usually required by users such as security, identity control, and management. Ozone has a repository creation flow for adding your instance of the Harbor Registry which can then be integrated into the platform.

3. Azure DevOps and GitLab Pipelines: If you already have Azure or GitLab pipelines for building and deploying applications, these pipelines can be triggered natively or within Ozone pipelines. You can hence manage deployments of several pipelines by triggering them from just one place. This also facilitates better governance and provides comprehensive insights.

4. Ziti SDK: The industry is moving away from VPNs towards embedding programmable networking within private apps. If you’re using NetFoundry’s Ziti SDKs, you can now work with them on Ozone as it has a better technical architecture to onboard private clusters.

5. SMTP Notifications for Azure AD Accounts: Real-time notifications help in better collaborations and alerts for specific events. If your organization has Azure Active Directory (AzureAD), Ozone automatically imports all the user-level email IDs to ensure seamless delivery of email notifications.

6. Kong API Gateway: In a bid to make hybrid and multi-cloud deployments easy, Ozone has added support for Kong API Gateway which is optimized for microservices and distributed architectures. Users can now leverage the Kong API Gateway integration on Ozone for enhanced security of external system calls.

7. Archival of Clusters on Ozone: Archival of your public/private clusters may not happen on popular cloud platforms like AWS, GCO, and Azure, and even if they do, come with their own cost and overheads. On Ozone, the platform automatically archives your clusters from your external cloud providers since typically they are deleted.

Watch this space for more product updates!