June 29, 2021
by Amanda McGuinness of Ammeon Solutions and Marcel Weinberg
It has been nearly 4 months since our previous v3.4.0 release and we’re super excited about this one!
With Ubuntu 16.04 reaching end-of-life, we are pleased to announce support for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). We have also included lots of performance improvements in v3.5.0.
See below, for further information on what’s included in the release.
Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) reached end-of-life at the end of April 2021, and therefore support for it has been removed from StackStorm v3.5.0 onwards.
We are pleased to announce that StackStorm v3.5.0 has added support for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), which will be supported with MongoDB v4.4 and Python 3.8.
We continue to support Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) and RedHat Enterprise Linux/CentOS 7 and 8, with MongoDB v4.0 and Python 3.6.
Even faster…
There have been a lot of performance improvements added to the v3.5.0 release, mainly in the database abstraction layer. Look out for a future blog post, that describes in detail the performance improvements and the benchmark results. These changes will substantially speed up action executions and workflow runs for most users, especially when large amounts of JSON are passed between actions.
On top of improving the database abstraction layer, contributors also improved the API/CLI/Web UI and service start-up times, so restarting StackStorm microservices should take less time than before.
As Orquesta workflows become more complex, a coordination backend is required. Previously, this was an optional StackStorm component, but now the one-line bash installer installs Redis as a co-ordination backend by default. Other coordination backends are also supported so please check out the coordination documentation page for more information.
Please follow the Upgrade Instructions and Notes for 3.5.0 release from the documentation to understand the extra steps required for upgrading from v3.4.1 to v3.5.0.
Additional changes include:
Node.js was upgraded to v14 for st2chatops
Nginx configuration has been updated to support TLS v1.2 and v1.3Web UI, including support for task retry and delay in the Workflow Designer, restriction on username and password length, and inactivity timers and automatic logoutst2 client now supports getting multiple resources in a single st2 get commandFor the full list of changes, please check out the release changelog.
Given the feedback we received from the ChatOps 2020 User Survey we are still working on rewriting st2chatops in Python and improving its integration with the rest of StackStorm. This will not be an easy task, so please pitch in and help out if you can! Find StackStorm v3.6.0 Roadmap project and ChatOps Discussion on Github.
Special thanks to Tomaz Muraus for all the performance investigation and improvement tasks, as well as his help on the Ubuntu 20.04 support.
Ubuntu 20.04 support was planned and organised by Carlos. He performed a lot of the tasks involved, with assistance from others in the community.
Thanks to Orchestral for their enhancements on security hardening and Web UI.
Marcel Weinberg was a great assistant release manager, helping me to keep an eye on the release plan, assisting on the Ubuntu 20.04 work, and helping with the pre-release and release testing. Thanks to Eugen and blag for their guidance and help throughout the release, and assisting me with the release process.
We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed towards the release: providing PR fixes, raising issues, commenting on discussions, etc. This release would not have been possible without the support, testing, and contributions from the community!
If StackStorm was helpful to you, please make a Donation to the project CommunityBridge profile. The funds will be used to support the StackStorm infrastructure behind the releases, packages, CI/CD.