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October 2025: Feature releases & highlights

Avatar photoStefan Wallin


Enhanced supctl installer, Avassa Command Line in Web UI, regexp support in label matching, Volga MQTT bridge, updated scaling report

The October releases provide these major enhancements:

Web UI Enhancements

Web supctl

The major feature of October is the launch of support for supctl in the Control Tower Web UI. As you probably know, supctl is a powerful tool for performing a wide range of tasks on the Avassa Edge Platform. It runs natively on Linux and macOS. We have now added support for supctl in the Control Tower. This helps ad hoc users access the features, as well as users who do not run Linux or Mac on their workstations. supctl runs in a minimal alpine with nano as editor.

You can start supctl from the Control Tower menu:

All commands you are used to are available, for example, showing your site status:

nano is embedded as an editor so that you can edit your configurations:

Things not supported in the web version of supctl

  • connect/tunnel with port mapping to an edge host. Tunneling without port mapping works fine.
  • profiles: in Control Tower you will run as the logged in user to that Control tower

Additional forms support

Volumes

For applications to mount volumes from the file system, these volumes must be mounted in /var/lib/supd/volumes. So, for example, your site configuration might say:

hosts:
  - host-id: <hostid>
    local-volumes:
      - name: data
        path: /data

And on that host, you would need to create /var/lib/supd/volumes/data.

We have now added form support to define that using the Control Tower Web UI:

💡 Read more on volumes.

Certificates

Many applications require certificates to communicate between different instances. For example, to secure your MQTT Mosquitto broker. The Avassa Edge Platform’s embedded secrets manager, Strongbox, provides a service for setting up an SSL/TLS certificate authority to issue certificates in this manner. In most cases, you would like to automate these operations using the command line or API. But we have now added Web UI forms support to ease the setup and learning process.

💡 Read more on SSL/TLS CA

supctl Enhancements

Data option

You can now pass the data option to supctl to return only the actual values, without the field names. This is useful when scripting and passing output to other tools. Consider an example where you would like to export all host names. The following supctl command shows all host names across all sites:

supctl show system sites --fields=hosts/hostname

- hosts:
    - hostname: wallubu
- hosts:
    - hostname: vienna-1
- hosts:
    - hostname: stockholm-1
    - hostname: stockholm-2
    - hostname: stockholm-3
...

Then you would have to post-process the output to remove hosts and hostname.

With the new values option, you can simply do:

supctl --values show system sites --fields=hosts/hostname

wallubu
vienna-1
stockholm-1
stockholm-2
stockholm-3
paris-1
milan-1
ip-10-20-6-58
madrid-1
iot-host
ip-10-20-14-255
ip-10-20-10-1
berlin-1
amsterdam-1

Show application versions

We have also simplified operations to understand application versioning with options version-list and version as illustrated below:

supctl show applications robot-controller --version-list 
- "1.2"
- "1.1"

Show the application specification for a specific version:

supctl show --config applications robot-controller --version 1.2
name: robot-controller
version: "1.2"
services:
  - name: popcorn-controller-service
    mode: replicated
    replicas: 1

💡Read more on application versioning

Enhanced installer

We now provide an installer that adds supctl to your path and ensures that tab completion is generated automatically for each new shell you start. In previous releases, you had to manually make these modifications to your shell profile.

The above screenshot shows the new installer available from the Control Tower. The most important thing is that supctl has a new command install which performs all steps needed to make supctl available on your host.

After installation, you need to restart your shell, and then you can log in.

Regexp pattern matching for labels

When defining the target for an application deployment, you use a Boolean expression that matches labels. Assume you would like to deploy an application to all sites matching

kind = 3a or kind = 3b

The Avassa Edge Platform now supports regular expressions for label matching. Use the ~ operator

MQTT Bridge

The Avassa Edge Platform includes an edge-native publish/subscribe bus called Volga. It is used internally to distribute container logs, application metrics, and host metrics across sites.

In many deployments, it can be useful to make these topics available through an external MQTT broker. This is easily done using the Avassa MQTT Bridge, available here:

https://gitlab.com/avassa-public/mqtt-bridge

Updated scalability report

We have updated our large-scale performance validation of the Avassa Edge Platform. The new scalability report includes expanded measurements and confirms the efficient management of 10,000 edge sites, with predictable performance and low resource usage.

Read the full report here: https://avassa.io/tech/avassa-edge-site-scalability-test-report/

Minor enhancements

  • Remote reboot of a site, or individual hosts on a site
supctl do --site vehicle-1 diagnostics reboot --all-hosts
  • You can now use variables in the mount path, for example:
variables:
  CFG_NAME: config.toml
..
	env:
		CFG_PATH: /etc/${CFG_NAME}
	mounts:
	  - volume-name: cfg
	    files:
	       - name: my-config.toml
	         mount-path: /etc/${CFG_NAME}

In this example, you can then use a single variable to pass as an environment variable to the application, as well as to specify the mount path for the volume. Read more on variables.

Bringing the Command Line to the Browser

Command-line tools have shaped system administration since the 1970s. From Ken Thompson’s first Unix shell to the remote consoles of DEC’s VMS systems and the later explosion of open-source tooling, operators have always relied on text-based interfaces for clarity and precision. Over time, those tools moved from terminals to SSH sessions and, more recently, into web browsers.

When Kubernetes introduced kubectl, it became the modern reference for API-driven command-line control. Avassa’s supctl follows in that lineage: a concise, transparent interface built directly on the Control Tower API, tailored for distributed edge environments. Since its introduction, supctl has evolved with structured output and new commands to simplify large-scale operations.

The October releases add a new chapter: running supctl directly inside the Control Tower Web UI. It bridges the old and the new: the directness of a terminal with the accessibility of a browser, continuing a long history of bringing command-line precision to where operators actually work.

One of the first web-based terminals was AnyTerm, and it did let you play Tetris