Welcome to the monthly product updates from Devtron.

We all are excited to share monthly updates with you. Devtron’s March release is packed with powerful features and enhancements crafted by us to streamline your workflow and unlock new levels of efficiency.

What’s New!

Deployment Window

Have you ever experienced downtime due to last-minute deployment? A last-minute deployment before critical events can be a perfect recipe for disaster, which can lead to downtime when your users need your services most.

Unplanned or unwanted application deployments can severely impact an organization’s services, especially at peak hours or critical periods. We understand this challenge, Devtron offers you the Deployment Window feature. A feature that will allow you to define specific timeframes when the deployments are either blocked or allowed for specific environments.

Deployment Window comes in two types:

1. Blackout Window: You can schedule the Blackout Window to block deployments by your team members in specific environments (production or other sensitive environments)during peak times. This ensures there will be no disruption due to last-minute deployments. It offers centralized control over the deployments, with the ability to whitelist specific individuals (admins, super admins) to execute the deployment in exceptional cases.
2. Maintenance Window: This window allows you to define a dedicated time frame where the deployments are permitted. Enabling teams to perform maintenance on critical environments like production.

Devtron Deployment Window empowers you to minimize the risk and maintain a consistent, reliable application experience for your users.

Image Promotion

You’ve precisely crafted a production pipeline for building and deploying your application to production servers. Following best practices and industry standards, your workflow consists of multiple stages like CI, staging, UAT, and CD, with pre & post stages and approval processes. Now let's say your users experience some noticeable difficulties after your latest release. You and your team realize every second counts; therefore, you plan to release a quick hotfix on production. However, this means going through all the intermediary stages in your workflow, which you would have ideally wished to bypass.

Devtron brings an Image Promotion feature that allows you to promote an existing image to production from any stage of your workflow. So now take control of your critical hotfix deployments by defining the reusable image promotion policies. Moreover, you can set filtering conditions as pass/fail criteria for the image. In case you are worried about the unplanned promotion of images, you can introduce an approval process too. Once the super admin defines the policy, you can go to the application and select the image along with the target environment where you wish to promote the image. If the policy mandates approval of the image, the promotion request goes to the approvers. If the request is approved, the image will finally appear in the target environment for deployment.

The Image Promotion feature brings you lightning-fast fixes, reduces downtime, and all over provides a streamlined workflow.

Notification on Vulnerability Detection

We at Devtron consider the security and reliability of your application to be our top priorities. We understand how important it is to detect vulnerabilities and get notified timely in the dynamic world of cloud computing. We have introduced a feature that allows you to set notifications for the detection of vulnerabilities in an application or an environment. you know how a small vulnerability can bring down the system, and getting notified beforehand about vulnerabilities in the system can reduce the chances of disruption. Devtron already provides support for scanning vulnerabilities using tools such as Clair and Trivy. With this feature, you can opt to send the notification to relevant stakeholders.

Linked CI with Child Information

The Linked CI pipeline with child information provides you with a holistic view of the application deployed to the target environments (prod, staging, dev), how the pipelines are triggered (auto or manual), and the application's deployment status. It provides you with complete visibility over the deployment environments of your application.

Custom Git Repos for GitOps

To enhance the GitOps framework, we’re introducing a feature that allows users to choose the GitOps repository where they want Devtron to push all the manifests. Previously, Devtron automatically created the repositories within the organization with a preconfigured pattern. Now with this feature, we are providing flexibility for users to choose whether to create a new repository in an organization or you want to utilize their existing repository by providing us the URL of the repository.

What has Improved

User Access Management (Phase-3)

In the previous two phases, this feature allowed users to grant temporary access to your Devtron dashboard. You can set the status for the user as ‘Active’, ‘Inactive’, or ‘Keep active until’. Users can now perform bulk operations like bulk deletion and bulk status updates. At the permission level, users can execute bulk deletes on permission groups.

Phase 3 of User Access Management

• Allows you to update the status of the user while adding or updating a new user.
• You can define the status for specific user groups and also for direct permission. So now there is no more hassle for revoking access for the user.
• Support for managing user status for Microsoft AD and LDAP user groups. This feature will allow administrators to view and manage the status of individual user accounts within these user groups.
• You can define the status of API tokens.

Runtime Input Parameters

This feature is aimed to enhance the build process with its capabilities to define the key-value pairs as parameters before triggering the build pipeline. This feature enables you to customize the build process according to their specific needs. You can seamlessly add the environment variables within the build environment. Using these environment variables, you can enable the conditional triggering of the builds. You can specify the conditions that must be met before the build pipeline is initiated, which ensures that the builds are executed only when necessary and under desired conditions.

Enhancements

Application Group Deployments

Previously, when deploying multiple applications via application groups, the user had to repeatedly retry the failed deployments if the deployment failed for some applications due to exceeding a certain limit of applications. Although we provided an option to retry failed then there is another problem the modal vanishes if the page is refreshed.

To address this issue, we have introduced an enhancement that provides a more user-friendly experience when handling failed deployment application groups. Now, even if the page is refreshed, the user can seamlessly retry the failed deployments without losing the context or having to start over.

Bug Fixes

• Login of docker in the post-deployment pod now correctly selects the container registry.
• Restored the ability to fetch commits when the build type is tagged.
• Errors related to GitOps operations are displayed on Devtron UI.
• Addressed the shallow clone functionality issue, ensuring reliable and complete repository cloning during the build process.
• The issues with mono-repo migration checks for chart store apps, ensuring accurate update and deployment triggers are resolved.
• Fixed the issues with the dependabot version update.
• Fixed the webhook functionality in parent pipelines for seamless child pipeline triggering.
  

If you have any queries, don't hesitate to connect with us and feel free to book a session if you need a demo. Join the lively discussions and shared knowledge in our vibrant Discord Community.