Object storage and enhanced multicloud governance in Mist v4.5

Dimitris Moraitis profile pic

We are happy to announce the release of Mist Cloud Management Platform v4.5!

First of all, Mist v4.5 introduces support for object storage. Also, it enhances your multicloud governance thanks to new ways of controlling who provisions what. Finally, this release includes support for Ansible v2 playbooks and a pleasant surprise for Kubernetes users.

AWS S3 bucket in Mist
An AWS S3 bucket in Mist

For a glimpse into the future of Mist, you can check out the docs for the upcoming version 2 of our RESTful API. You can also install and try out the Mist CLI. Both of these are under heavy development and not feature complete yet. They will be ready later this summer with the release of Mist v5. In the meantime, we would love to hear your thoughts and comments at support@mist.io.

Object storage support

Our first iteration includes a read-only view of AWS S3 and OpenStack Swift buckets. Future releases will extend support to more clouds and add more functionality. Our end goal is to help you manage all your buckets, across clouds, from a single point.

This feature is not enabled by default. To enable it, go to the relevant cloud page and toggle the Object Storage switch. In a few moments, Mist will auto-discover your buckets in that cloud.

Enabling object storage support
Enabling object storage support

The largest portion of this feature was contributed by active community members. A special thank you to Sergey, Vova and Denis!

Enhanced multicloud governance

Mist gives you fine-grained control over provisioning and lifecyle policies across more than 20 infrastructure platforms. This is done through Mist's RBAC and constraints.

For example, Mist admins can specify that team A will be able to create new machines only in AWS US-East, will have a quota of $1,000/month and machines will expire and auto-shutdown three days after launch.

In Mist 4.5 we add two new types of constraints:

  • Allowed and Disallowed machine sizes. Allowed sizes become the only available options for your team members. If you just want to exclude some, mark them as disallowed.
  • You can also control which fields of the machine provisioning form are visible and their default values. This helps limit available options and simplify the provisioning process for your end users.

To configure constraints, your only option until recently was JSON. Mist v4.5 keeps the JSON interface but also adds a more user-friendly web form.

Add constraint form
Mist's add constraint form

For more details on constraints, check out our documentation.

Ansible v2

Mist v4.5 includes an Ansible upgrade and a relevant architectural change. You can now upload and execute Ansible v2 playbooks from Mist's script section. Playbook execution is done from a short-lived container, created on the fly for this purpose. This adds another layer of isolation and increases the overall security of the platform.

Other updates

In terms of other changes and updates:

  • Helm chart for installing Mist in a Kubernetes cluster. Mist Community Edition can be installed in Kubernetes clusters for some time now but the process was lacking and was not documented. In Mist v4.5, we adapted the Helm chart of our Enterprise Edition and you can now use it as seen in our docs on Github.
  • Configurable portal name in automated emails. In several occasions, Mist sends automated emails e.g. for notifications, rule triggers etc. By changing the PORTAL_NAME parameter in your settings.py all automated emails will mention the portal name you chose. This is available only in Mist Community and Enterprise editions.
  • Email notification when creating an API token. When you create a new Mist API token, Mist will send an automated email notification to the relevant user's address. This is meant as an additional security precaution.

Conclusion

Mist v4.5 brings object storage support, more fine-grained provisioning policies, support for Ansible v2 playbooks, and several minor features and enhancements. We hope you enjoy it!

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

If you'd like to try it 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.