New in Mist v4.4

Today we are announcing the release of the Mist Cloud Management Platform v4.4.

Mist v4.4 brings a lot of updates to supported clouds and a brand new implementation of the web shell. It includes several UI/UX enhancements coupled by an upgrade to Polymer v3 and Web Components v1. Finally, it introduces role-based access controls on images and constraints on machine sizes.

New web shell and script editor
New web shell window and script editor

This will be the last release in the 4.X line. We are already working on Mist v5 which will introduce a redesigned RESTful API and brand new CLI and a number of big new features. To save you from waiting, we are shipping previews of both today. Stay tuned for a dedicated post with more information.

For a quick overview of the entire Mist platform you can watch a 20-minute video demo on YouTube.

Cloud integrations

This release adds support for:

  • CloudSigma. This is totally new and allows you to manage machines and volumes on CloudSigma.
  • Linode v4 API. All new Linode clouds in Mist will require a v4 Linode API token. Check out Linode's documentation on how to get an API token. Existing clouds connected to Mist with API v3 tokens will continue to work.
  • Linode volumes. You can now list, create, delete, attach and detach block storage volumes.
  • DigitalOcean power cycle. In some cases, your Droplets may end up in an error state that is impossible to recover from. Power cycle will perform a hard shutdown and will then power on your Droplet again.
  • vSphere rename and clone machine.

New web shell

The web shell is one of our favourite Mist features. It allows us to quickly troubleshoot things from within Mist without having to share actual private keys with our team members. In fact, we use it so often that we brought the old implementation to its knees :)

For v4.4, we rewrote the backend component in Go. This improves performance and stability. In the UI front, you can open the web shell in a new window. This way you can work in any number of shells simultaneously.

Web UI

The web UI in Mist v4.4 leverages Polymer v3 and Web Components v1. This improves browser compatibility and developer experience. You will also notice some performance improvements. More importantly, this upgrade lays the groundwork for new features coming up in v5.

Also, we introduce the Monaco Editor wherever XML and JSON are involved. Monaco also handles inline scripts and templates. With Monaco and several other minor fixes our goal is to make the UX more uniform and friendly.

New in commercial editions

In Mist Hosted Service (HS) and Enterprise Edition (EE), you can now:

  • Set RBAC rules to images. For example, you can give your dev team access only to Debian 10 images.
  • Add constraints to machine size. This gives you finer and pro-active control over your inventory. For example, a team can provision only machines with 2 CPU cores, 4GB of RAM and 50GB of disk.

Specifically in Mist EE, v4.4 adds authentication with Microsoft 365.

Conclusion

Mist v4.4 brings CloudSigma support, several enhancements to other clouds, a new web shell and a ton of other fixes. It introduces finer controls over images and machine sizes, and brings authentication with Microsoft 365 to Mist EE users. More importantly it sets the groundwork for our next major release v5.0 with an upgrade to our front-end framework and a preview of Mist's API v2 and CLI.

For a guided tour of the Mist platform, please reach out to demo@mist.io.

If you'd like to try out for yourselves, sign up for a Mist Hosted Service account and begin your 14-day free trial.

Community Edition users can get the latest version from Mist's GitHub repository.