Palette 4.3 simplifies edge operations, supports more environments and streamlines cluster creation

“A strong innovator”

The analysts at GigaOm just published their 2024 ratings of the managed Kubernetes and edge Kubernetes landscapes, and in their writeup they said “[Spectro Cloud] is a strong innovator, balancing the broad platform needs of its customers with features they want both now and in the near future.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves: innovation is what we’re all about. And today we’re going to introduce you to a few of the broad platform changes and new features we’re delivering in Palette 4.3.

4.3 is our second release of the year, after 4.2 in January. If you missed that, do go back and check it out — we showcased some cool stuff like our dynamic edge overlay.

A new way to deploy and manage at the edge

When we’re working with customers on edge computing projects, all kinds of tricky scenarios come up that mean conventional workflows for deploying and managing edge devices simply don’t fit.

Some organizations are operating large numbers of edge devices on an airgapped campus, such as a factory site or military base. For those situations, we can deploy an instance of the Palette management plane locally. 

Some are operating at sites with intermittent connectivity, in which case Palette’s decentralized agent-based architecture and content pre-loading can overcome the challenge. 

But there’s more.

Some regulated organizations have policies stating that edge clusters can’t connect to a central external management platform, period. Others are deploying clusters at distributed remote locations where there is no connectivity at all to the wider world.

In these situations, you can’t onboard and manage the cluster from the comfort of the cloud. You need a field engineer physically proximate to each edge device. That field engineer is unlikely to be a Kubernetes expert, and they may be editing yaml manually from a snowstorm on the prairie, or in the noise and heat of an industrial location. Plenty of room for human error under pressure, right?

These are the situations and workflows we’re solving for in Palette 4.3 with our new Local UI capability.

It works like this.

Just as always, your platform engineering team, sat at a central location, do the vitally important ‘day 0’ work. They define the desired-state configuration of each cluster, documenting it in a Cluster Profile. They build out the installation artifacts, images, that are needed to fire up the edge host and build the Kubernetes cluster; these images are loaded onto a USB stick and taken to the edge site.

This is where the non-expert field engineer takes over for ‘day 1’, where the deployment happens. They use the installation ISO to set up the edge device on site.

With Palette’s new Local UI feature, the field engineer isn’t sat typing into a terminal; they have a slick, simple GUI that walks them through the installation process, minimizing the risk of human error and avoiding the need to copy out esoteric commands from a playbook or edit complex YAML files manually.

This idea of avoiding manual editing led us to another new feature in Palette 4.3, Cluster Profile variables. 

Variables provide a way for the field engineer to provide details specific to the edge cluster on site, such as the cluster name or IP address, in a single location in the Local UI, instead of having to manually paste these values in across multiple YAML files. The platform engineering team defines which variables are needed when they’re building out the Cluster Profile, and all the field engineer needs to do is fill them in once.

Local UI makes it easy for field technicians after installation, too. Day 2 activities like troubleshooting, patching and configuration changes are performed in exactly the same way.

Ultimately, both Cluster Profile variables and Local UI make it easier for both centralized Platform Engineering teams and onsite Field Technicians to better work together and reduce the overall operational effort.

Expanding your choice of environment and distro

Palette is all about supporting your choice of where to place your workloads. In this release, we’re enhancing support for: 

• Azure Gov AKS: In the previous release (4.2) we delivered Azure Gov regions support for IaaS target clusters. Now in 4.3 we are following up with support for Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes service, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
   
• D2IQ Konvoy on VMware vSphere: we continue to support D2IQ customers that are trying to protect and futureproof their existing investments by bringing support for D2IQ’s Konvoy distribution on vSphere environments.
  
  
• Nutanix: in 4.2 we added support for Nutanix clusters as a tech preview. With this release we’ve made it easier to create Nutanix clusters. Palette's UI now intelligently identifies variables within the YAML specification file and provides intuitive, easy-to-use fields for quick and accurate value entry.

All of these enhancements are available in both Palette Enterprise and our Palette VerteX editions for public sector and regulated industries.

Speaking of which: our government customers will be pleased to hear that as of Palette 4.3, we are enhancing several of our security standards to align with the latest standards. This includes support for TLS 1.3 across both workload and management clusters, and compliance with NIST 800 standards for login password specifications and separation of duties for administrator roles. 

Streamlining your cluster creation workflow

From Palette’s first release, we’ve been proud of how simple (and beautiful) we made the experience of building a Kubernetes cluster. But that doesn’t mean we’ve rested on our laurels.

In Palette 4.3 we’re introducing a new, streamlined workflow for creating clusters, with a goal of making it not only quicker, with fewer clicks and fewer screens, but also even safer. 

When you create a cluster, you of course have to be careful about how you configure all the parameters. Now Palette gives you richer contextual guidance and handy in-product documentation links to help even inexperienced users make the right choices.

Updated Cluster Profile selection step.

More tooltips and guidance on menus and links to documentation.

Learn more and give us your feedback

There’s more great stuff in Palette 4.3 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 multi tenant 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 the next version of Palette!