August 2023: Feature releases & highlights

Releases:

• supd: 23.8.0 – 23.8.1
• Control Tower: 23.8.0 – 23.8.5

The August releases contain these main features:

• Enhanced User Interface for Device and GPU labels: You can now edit the labels used for GPUs and external devices like Cameras in the Web UI. The Web UI also gives a better overview of the labels.
• System settings available in the User Interface: There are many system-wide settings that you previously could only set using the command line. These are now available in the Control Tower UI.

Enhanced User Experience for Device and GPU labels

We have now added forms support for editing label rules for devices like cameras and GPUs. You might know our “standard” labels, statically configured on a site like region = Europe. When you deploy applications, you refer your deployment to those labels, and the Avassa system will find the corresponding sites.

Device labels associated with cameras and GPUs are different; a simplistic approach would have been that the site provider would have to label specific hosts. But that would not scale and be very hard to maintain. Instead, device and GPU labels are rules on the site. Whenever a host matches a GPU or device label, that host will dynamically get the corresponding label, hence “Device Discovery” and “GPU Discovery”.

Device and GPU labels are also different because they are not part of the deployment expression. Instead, an application developer says, “My application needs a GPU” or “My application needs a camera of type X.” When that application is deployed to a site, the Edge Enforcer on the site will place the application on the host where there is a match for the label expression.

You can read more here:

• Device discovery
• GPU passthrough

These features have been available since previous in the Avassa platform. We have now added better visibility in the User Interface. First of all, there are now forms supporting the editing of label rules:

These kinds of labels can be defined per site, as shown above. But they can also be defined at the system level and applicable to all sites. You will see a new system icon in the Web UI:

In the example below, we apply the same rule but for all sites:

If you now inspect a site you will see device rules that are defined locally for that site OR that are propagated from the system settings. Global device label rules are shown in the screenshot below:

Resource profiles limit access to hardware resources such as CPU, memory, disk, etc. They are applied across two dimensions:

• per system, site, and host
• per tenant

The resulting resource restriction is the minimum of all profile intersections. Read more on resource profiles in our documentation section on resource management.

We have now added User Interface support for defining system-wide resource profiles in the new “System Settings” section:

In the May release highlights, we described the new edge site call home visibility feature. The User Interface now supports to enable this feature in the “System” section:

This is available in the system/call-home/settings object.

Podman support

Avassa operates north of Linux with a container runtime. We have so far supported Docker. But now we have added the support of Podman. During the installation time of the Edge Enforcer, you can specify the —podman option. You can mix and match Docker and Podman in the same system. This aligns with our Red Hat partnership and also the technical requirements of customers to be able to choose the container runtime.

Read more in our tutorial on how to install a site.

Smaller things

The Avassa command line tool, supctl, now updates itself whenever the model has changed. This gives the correct tab completion. In previous releases, you had to explicitly get the new model from the server with supctl model-update.