Feature Update December 2023

While everyone is getting ready for the holidays (at least here in US), we decided to go ahead and do a small release close on the heels of our Feature Update October 2023 release. The following new features have been added since the last release:

Support migration to Azure Linux while creating Azure clusters during restore

Azure Linux is a Linux distribution from Microsoft that is optimized to run on AKS nodes in Azure. With this update, we’ve added a new OS SKU option to the AKS node pool configuration options in the restore wizard. You can now choose either “Azure Linux” or “Ubuntu” (previously the only AKS OS option) as the operating system when creating AKS cluster node pools during restore. This feature also comes in handy if you want to easily migrate existing AKS cluster nodes to Azure Linux. Simply back up your existing cluster, then perform a restore and select automatic cluster creation, then select Customize node pools config and set OS SKU to “Azure Linux”.

Ability to configure a region for non-AWS S3 storage

CloudCasa has allowed customers to bring their own S3-compatible storage for a long time, but until now there was no provision to configure a specific region for non-AWS S3 providers. This did not cause any issues with the majority of S3-compatible object storage, but some S3-compatible providers do require that a region be configured. You can now do so when adding a user objectstore under Configuration/Storage.

Support for PVCs whose actual size is different from configured size in the manifest

This should be a rare scenario, but in some cases a PVC’s manifest shows one size while the size of the actual volume underneath is much larger. Backups work fine, but when a restore is performed the PVC is created with the size specified in the manifest, which may not be sufficient to hold all the data. We now support such uncommon configurations by allowing users to specify the actual PVC size. To do that, users need to add the annotation “cloudcasa.io/pvc-actual-size” and set its value to the actual size (using appropriate units as understood by Kubernetes). Here is an example:

kubectl -n <NAMESPACE> annotate pvc <PVC-NAME> cloudcasa.io/pvc-actual-size=250Gi

Note that this annotation needs to be present at backup time.

Removal of Security Scanning features

As pre-announced during our previous release, we have now removed the security vulnerability scanning features from CloudCasa. These had been in beta since last year. Usage of the security scanning features had just not been sufficient to justify developing them further. We feel that we can serve our customers better by focusing our efforts on more backup, restore, DR, and migration features instead.

If you would like recommendations for alternative vulnerability scanning tools, please contact our support team.

CloudFormation stack update

We have updated our AWS CloudFormation stack by removing some permissions needed earlier to support security scans. We also added some new permissions that were not explicitly listed before. You can re-launch the stack under the Configuration/Cloud Accounts page to apply the stack update to existing accounts.

Navigation changes in UI

With the removal of the security scanning features and the corresponding Security tab, we took the opportunity to make some additional UI changes to make navigation more intuitive. One such change was promoting Clusters and Databases from the Protection tab to new top-level tabs, making the Protection tab unnecessary. Similarly, we were able to remove the Clusters page from the Configuration tab, since it became redundant to the Clusters/Overview page. We hope that you like the new changes as much as we do!

Notes

With some browsers you may need to restart, hit Control-F5, and/or clear the cache to make sure you have the latest version of the CloudCasa web app when first logging in after the update. You can also try selectively removing cookies and site data for cloudcasa.io if you encounter any odd behavior.

As always, we want to hear your feedback on new features! You can contact us using the support chat feature, or by sending email to support@cloudcasa.io.