Palette 4.2 brings innovations in edge resiliency, new open-source Validator tool and a preview of Nutanix support

Let’s get 2024 started in style

If Santa Claus didn’t bring you everything you wished for over the holidays, fear not: it’s January and Palette 4.2 is here with a whole sackful of gifts to help you manage your Kubernetes clusters more effectively.

Our 4.1 version back in October was a bumper release, and we’ve kept up the pace of innovation, focusing on the areas that matter most to you.

In fact, with this release we’re officially introducing our Tech Preview program, to help accelerate how we get cutting-edge features out to the community. Features flagged as Tech Preview give you early access to new capabilities, with support and documentation from Spectro Cloud — but we don’t recommend them for production use. 

Let’s dive into a few of the highlights from 4.2.

A more resilient edge

Palette Edge is already the most resilient and robust choice for edge Kubernetes at scale, thanks to our unique decentralized architecture, airgap support and innovations like our 2-node HA capability.

With 4.2 we’re adding something really cool: a feature called Overlay Network.

This is an elegant solution to a very common and annoying problem where local node IP address changes — caused for example by power outages or DHCP lease expiry — break cluster communication. 

We’ve developed a unique self-discovering, self-updating overlay network that maps host network interfaces to stable IP addresses for the cluster to use through a virtual network. 

Even if the underlying DHCP-issued IP addresses change, the cluster won’t see it, and the administrator (that’s you) doesn’t have to do anything. 

It works with Calico, Flannel and Cilium CNIs on K3s (more supported distros to follow), and you can turn it on with a simple toggle in the Palette interface when you’re building your clusters. We call this the easy button to solve this issue, especially when compared to the alternatives — setting up new processes with a networking department, or being forced to build and maintain your own bespoke per-cluster VPNs.

We think this is a really big deal, particularly if you’re deploying edge hardware on networks you don’t own (for example at customer sites), or in large-scale projects where managing IP changes across many boxes and sites is impractical for your network teams to perform manually. 

That’s not the only edge innovation in Palette 4.2. We’ve also implemented a local Harbor registry for Palette Edge clusters, which can be loaded with common software images, as well as providing a pull-through cache capability. In edge locations, there may be poor or intermittent network connectivity. Deployed applications can face issues moving between nodes if they are unable to pull images, or they may be slow to move. With a local registry, applications can keep running when a node fails and a pod needs to move, even in the absence of network availability.

If you want to learn more about ensuring resiliency at the edge, check out our recent blog on The New Stack.

Greater control, no surprises

Nobody likes surprises — particularly IT pros deploying infrastructure. When you hit the ‘go’ button and a command fails, you’ve wasted valuable time.

To that end, we’ve developed a new tool called Validator. It gives you an automated way to run preflight checks against different clouds and environments (AWS, vSphere, OCI registries, etc) to make sure they’re ready to meet your stated configuration. 

If that sounds vague, a few simple examples might help: when you’re deploying, for example, a self-hosted instance of Palette or a Kubernetes cluster, you might have certain requirements for the destination environment. You might input that specific IAM roles need to exist, or service quotas in AWS, resources in vSphere, or network IP allocations. 

When you run Validator, it checks (and keeps checking) that your environment meets the requirements you’ve defined in your configuration, and alerts you to the validation result. You can use it pre deployment to ensure a smooth day 1, and to help troubleshoot day 2 errors.

We built Validator around the Kubernetes operator pattern, which means it’s declarative and highly extensible, with the ability to build new controller plugins for each environment you need validating. Validator is easy to install via Helm chart into a Kubernetes cluster, or set up and use with our Palette CLI tool. We’ve made it open source, so you can check out the repository now.

We’re proud of Validator and how it adds to our open source contributions, but it’s not the only new feature in Palette 4.2 that helps you avoid surprises and disruptions.

For example, Palette 4.2 introduces automatic Kubernetes certification rotation (30 days before their expiration) for existing and new clusters, without triggering node repaves. There is no UI implementation, everything is done in the backend (users don’t have to configure anything). We’ve added automatic SSL certificate renewal, again without repaves.

Support for more choice in more environments

It’s always been our mission to help you wherever Kubernetes takes you, without restricting your choice. We’ve been hard at work expanding the range of distros and environments you can use within Palette, and in version 4.2 we now offer:

• Azure GovCloud in Palette VerteX and Palette Enterprise, with IaaS support for Arizona, Texas and Virginia regions.
• Palette Virtual Machine Orchestrator (VMO) on Canonical MAAS bare-metal clusters for Palette VerteX
• Canonical’s MicroK8s distribution on Canonical MAAS bare-metal clusters
• Rancher’s RKE2 distribution on more cloud providers, including AWS, Azure and MAAS.
• Nutanix on self-hosted Palette instances, under a limited Tech Preview release.

Learn more and give us your feedback

There’s more great stuff in Palette 4.2 than we touch on in this blog. If you’d like to learn more, check out the release notes for full details.

If you’re an existing Palette customer using our multitenant SaaS, you’ll already have all these features today.

Not yet a customer? If you haven’t seen Palette in action for a while, it’s time to explore what’s new. Get in touch for an orientation demo and free access.

Of course, as always our Slack community is available if you have any questions, feedback or feature requests. We’re all ears.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you soon for Palette 4.3!