Release Notes: April 2023

2023-04-295 minute read

Welcome to our April release notes! This month, we've continued to refine and enhance the user experience, building upon the significant updates introduced last month. Our latest improvements include the addition of notifications, the (improved) reintroduction of pod restarts, and so much more! Furthermore, users whose usage surpasses the free tier limitations can now enjoy a 14-day free trial of our Pro tier. Let's dive into the details of this month's updates!

NEW - Notifications

By Prajjwal, Subham, Tushar

Users can now get notified of application and environment changes. You get full control over which actions you want to get notified for; we notify for both build and deploy steps actions (Running, Successful, Triggered, Canceled, Failed).

The notifications feature is powered by Novu. Clicking on a notification takes you to that specific app/env page. Users have the option to mark notifications as read/unread or remove notifications.

In-app notifications are on by default. Slack, Discord, Teams, and email notifications can also be set up easily from the Settings > Connections page.

In addition to the workplace notifications, there are new indicators in the pipeline builders that show you when there’s an update in the run history.

Notifications

NEW - Pod restarts

By Prashant, Tushar, Subham

Pod restarts have been reintroduced to Argonaut. We have improved from the old method and now trigger Pod restarts by adding annotation. This restarts all deployment and stateful sets pods.

There are now two ways to trigger pod restarts.

  1. Manual restart Selecting your deployment of choice, move to the monitor tab. And click on the “Restart All Pods” button.
  2. Automatic restart This can be set from the builder view by selecting the deploy phase, as shown below. Selecting this allows Argonaut to forcefully restart your app every time you update your app, e.g. when secrets are updated.

Manual and automatic Pod restarts

NEW - Alert banner for PRs

By Tushar, Ankit

The new seamless build config creation/update experience includes PR navigation, with an auto-opening banner linking to the necessary PR for the build config to work.

Alert banner for pr

NEW - Deployment history with error type

By Subham

You can now see the error type for the failed deployments under the deployment history tab. The failed state is also expandable and gives you more information on the type of error. To see this, Applications > Your pipeline > Your deployment > Deployment History tab.

errormsg

NEW - Free trial of paid tiers

By Subham

We now offer users a 14-day free trial of our Pro tier once they exceed the Free tier limits. A new message on the top right of your screen shows which tier you are currently in, whether you are using the free tier, and how many days of the free trial are remaining. Once your free tier is over, you get a prompt to switch to a paid plan or scale down to Free tier usage to continue using our product.

On the billing page, users in our paid plans will also get a view of their previous billing amount and their upcoming billing amount and date.

pro-trial

CHANGED - Migrated deployments

By Tushar, Prashant

All user apps have now been migrated to the ArgoCD workflow. The apps deployed using Helm (our previous approach) now have a new migrated app icon next to their name on the app list page.

CHANGED - Buttons changes on pipeline builder

By Tushar

Update and apply changes to build and deploy steps separately. The button at the bottom of each step allows the user to update changes to the build / deploy step individually. Previously, only one button

The deploy step has a new deployment trigger button. This can be set to ▶️ or ⏸️. In the ▶️, the deployment step is automatically started once the build completes. When the button is in ⏸️, the deploy stage is paused and has to be manually triggered.

CHANGED - App list now shows deployments

By Tushar

More pages are getting updates to match the new flow. The new app-list page, when you navigate to Environment > Apps tab, now shows the various deployment steps from different pipelines that are grouped by environments.

CHANGED - Default storage class for EKS

By Aadhav

We have upgraded the default storage class for AWS EKS from gp2 to the superior gp3. This gives our users more efficiency in terms of cost and performance. gp3 provides higher IOPS and throughput at a 20% lower cost per GB.

CHANGED - Applications pipelines screen

By Tushar, Subham

Once you select Applications from the sidebar, you will see a screen with various pipelines. This screen has some updates.

  1. We’ve added a delete option for pipelines. This does not delete the app itself; it only deletes the associated build and deploy steps.
  2. We’ve added a new pipeline step status view for each pipeline. You can see which steps have been executed, and it is updated live.
  3. Styling changes to make the page easy to read and use.

pipeline

CHANGED - Retained Helm versions

By Prashant

Using config files, the default number of Helm versions retained is set to 10. During Helm upgrades, older versions beyond the recent 10 get purged. Helm supports max history, which can be used to retain n number of previous revisions of the release. The default value for this on the Helm cli tool is also 10.

Other minor changes and fixes

  • Kubernetes secrets were persisting despite removal from Argonaut; the issue is now fixed.
  • Fixed CD integration issue for new workplaces.
  • Resolved issue with deploying migrated apps from GitLab
  • Fixed the issue of shortened imageTag sha containing only numbers
  • Added backward compatibility for monitoring of apps deployed using Helm
  • Fixed issue with GCP artifact registry URL
  • Tooltip design improvements
  • CSS changes in forms, dropdowns, etc.
  • Fixed issues with Lambda deployments
  • Creating new Lambda apps redirects to the new Lambda logs

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