GKE and EKS in Mist v4.7

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We are happy to announce version 4.7 of the Mist Cloud Management Platform.

The biggest new feature in this release is support for GKE and EKS clusters.

It is also easier to install Mist itself in a Kubernetes cluster. In fact, thanks to Helm and our updated CLI, you can now install and use Mist without ever leaving your command line!

Check out a demo in the video below.

Under the hood, v4.7 brings better performance and several improvements in GCP, EC2, KVM, OpenStack, Cloudify and Ansible integrations.

Finally, Mist's API v2 and its new CLI are now more mature than ever. Both of them will reach their first stable releases with Mist v5.0 in the coming months.

GKE and EKS support

EKS cluster in Mist's web UI
EKS cluster in Mist's web UI

In Mist v4.7 you can view your clusters in GKE and EKS including their node pools, nodes, and pods. You can also view price information for their control plane and their nodes. All of these are automatically discovered and updated in real time.

Besides viewing your clusters you can also delete them and edit the autoscaling parameters of your node pools.

Finally, you can create new clusters and get auto-renewing kubeconfig credentials for kubectl. These actions are only available in Mist's API and CLI.

Update your kubeconfig with Mist CLI

Future releases will bring additional features and supported flavors. Our end goal is a unified control panel for cloud native, virtualized and bare metal infrastructure.

Installation and CLI

You can install Mist in a Kubernetes cluster, using Helm, or in a single host, using Docker Compose.

The Kubernetes option is constantly gaining steam because it offers better availability and scaling. At the same time, Kubernetes is mainstream now. Tooling has evolved a lot, and you can easily provision a new cluster.

Mist v4.7 streamlines the Kubernetes installation process. You only need to run three commands.

helm repo add mist https://dl.mist.io/charts
helm repo update
helm install mist-ce mist/mist-ce

At the same time, our CLI is more mature than ever. You can now perform all common management tasks e.g. search for resources, send actions to them, create new ones etc.

In fact, you can install Mist and use it on a daily basis without ever leaving your command line!

We have prepared two videos showcasing this. The first, includes installation steps in Linode's Kubernetes Engine (LKE). You can watch it here. The second, includes installation steps in Vultr's Kubernetes Engine (VKE). You can watch it here.

Under the hood

In Mist v4.7 we improved performance with two changes:

  1. We refactored object storage support. Heavy S3 users will notice big improvements.
  2. We reduced the amount of image, size and locations metadata fetched by the web UI. This information is now retrieved only when it is needed.

In the integration front:

  • We updated the price catalog for GCP and EC2 instances.
  • We fixed some bugs that were preventing the execution of Ansible playbooks and Cloudify templates.
  • We fixed an issue with the authentication URL of some OpenStack flavors.
  • We improved the way Mist fetches IPs and network interfaces from KVM guests. Also, we added serial console support.

Finally, Mist allows you to meter usage of block storage volumes and set custom prices for them. These are supported only in Mist's CLI and API respectively.

Getting metering info for volumes with Mist's CLI
Getting metering info for volumes with Mist's CLI

Conclusion

We are very excited about Mist v4.7, the new features and improvements it brings. We hope you enjoy it!

For a quick demo of the Mist platform, you can book a call with me.

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.