Nov 30, 2020
by Eugen Cusmaunsa
Hello Automation folks!
We would like to quickly update StackStorm community about the project progress, releases, plans and roadmap. Here is the overview.
v3.3.0 went out in October. In this release Mistral was deprecated in favor of Orquesta, the workflow engine designed specifically for StackStorm. Chef was removed as a deployment method and Hipchat deleted from the list of chatops providers. By adding CentOS/RHEL 8 support in st2 v3.2.0, CentOS/RHEL 6 is also decommissioned as part of the OS flavor rotation. Thanks to our contributors from @DELL, one of the StackStorm adopters, docker-compose deployment had a full major overhaul and now relies on the same Docker images as K8s. MongoDB 4.0 is now the currently supported version across all the platforms. Check out v3.3.0 Release Announcement by Nick Maludy from Encore Technologies for more details.
There are ongoing discussions about transitioning chatops to the new framework. We have gathered some good community feedback on our ChatOps roadmap for how to rewrite ChatOps in Python for better integration into the rest of StackStorm (who wanted ChatOps RBAC?). We also met for a ChatOps Roadmap Meeting in November organized by @blag and discussed possible project direction. If you’re interested to get involved, please join us in #chatops StackStorm Slack channel. Use cases, testing, evaluation, design ideas, implementation, feedback, – there are so many ways to help the StackStorm pushing this story forward.
In November UK Infrastructure Automation Meetup was organized with some interesting talks about the StackStorm history, StackStorm OSS Community and ChatOps & AWS demo by Amanda McGuinness of Ammeon Solutions. It’s great to see such events happening around StackStorm and hope we’ll find more meetups in the future that will share the journey of automating all the things! Spreading the word out is great and if you’d like to share your story, use case, write a guest blog post, case study or maybe just highlight the technical difficulty you solved with st2, – please reach out to us! We’d love to highlight it from StackStorm side.
It took more than expected time to cut the v3.3.0 and StackStorm maintainer team decided to switch to a periodic 3 months release cadence. This means depending on what landed in the codebase during these three months, we’ll release a minor vA.B.C version if there are any important features ready for production. Otherwise, in case of small bugfixes and enhancements just a patch version like vA.B.C will be released instead. This will help us to establish the project release heartbeat and shape better expectations from our community.
Following the new 3 months release cadence, we plan new StackStorm version 3.4.0 by the end of January, 2021. Python 2 deprecation and integrating previously Enterprise features are the biggest items, but there are many other smaller fixes and enhancements available to pick up. If you want to contribute, take a look at Github projects: [ 1 ], [ 2 ], [ 3 ]. Join our #development channel in StackStorm Community Slack and just ask where help is needed.
Python 2 officially has reached EOL and StackStorm will be deprecating it in the future version, moving the platform core to Python 3 only. Project Maintainers and Contributors had several discussions and meetups to talk about the technical details and we’ve updated our community about the plan and the migration path. Check out: Python 2 Deprecation Plan: Say goodbye to python 2 by Amanda McGuinness of Ammeon Solutions. Get ready!
As you may heard Extreme Networks open sourced the code that was previously part of the paid EWC aka StackStorm Enterprise. However while the repositories are open, the integration into the core still needed to be done. StackStorm Open Source project Maintainers and Contributors are working on including these features in the upcoming v3.4.0 release. We also want to thank the Orchestral.ai and @Starbucks SRE team, one of the StackStorm adopters for helping with the ongoing RBAC/LDAP integration into st2 core and would like to invite other Adopters using StackStorm in production to help us driving the project forward, together.
As previously Enterprise features are becoming available for free, we’d like to remind everybody that StackStorm is maintained by the committee of Open Source volunteers during their spare time. You can help us supporting the project too by donating a small amount. The funds will be used for sustaining the project infrastructure (see expenses), which is critical for shipping the releases to you, our users.
Thank you all for your interest and support of StackStorm so far!
Cheers,
StackStorm Team