New features in 5.13

Secret manager framework

Keeping secrets secret is generally a difficult task. That’s why software like Azure Key Vault, AWS Secrets Manager or HashiCorp Vault are growing in popularity for both small and large enterprises. Having centralized password management makes it easy to automatically rotate access credentials for whole sets of APIs and systems or have the ability to revoke passwords from a single place provisioning new credentials at the same time.

CloverDX Server can now provision passwords from supported Secret managers directly into executed jobs using extended parameter notation - ${secret:<manager-name>/<secret id>} (for example, ${secret:prod/dwh-pass}). Such notation can be used anywhere where parameters can be used including directly in Connections, CTL code, Component properties, etc. 

In this release we launch with support for Azure Key Vault. Additional secret managers to follow in next release.

Job Inspector updates

This release marks major update of Job Inspector features. Job Inspector now allows you to view details of all objects from job Outline. You can display properties of your database connections, lookup tables, sequences as well as dictionary.

Server administrators can further restrict Data Inspector permissions only to specified group of users and prevent them from seeing edge data.

Operations

There were several improvements related to CloverDX Server maintenance. Besides new stack support discussed in separate chapter, CloverDX 5.13 comes with support of MySQL 8.0 as its backend database, ability to mask sensitive information injected from environment in Server UI and Support package. Support package can now also contain server health information (CPU/Memory utilization, Job queue status, etc.) along with advanced SAML logging and backend database communication log (both subject to additional logging configuration).

The largest change for DevOps is the ability to run CloverDX jobs on suspended server by means of manual override. This override may be provided either by a dialogue (when running from Designer or Server UI) or by special header when running job from REST API. Manual override will help you for situations where server automation features need to be suspended but still some operations have to run – for example, to simplify cluster migrations, software upgrades and code deployment.

Open Liberty platform stack

Along with RedHat, VMWare (Pivotal) stacks, CloverDX now supports Open Liberty application server on IBM SDK 8 or OpenJDK 1.8 with OpenJ9.

Smaller updates

Apache Avro graduation
CTL functions of Apache Avro message format were graduated from incubation. The functions work just like they did before, so if you use them in your solutions, you do not need to make any changes to your code.

CloverDX Designer usability
Many reported usability and development improvements were implemented. Few highlights:

• You will now be able to get design-time hints for various runtime parameters like RUN_ID and others which are injected into jobs when they run.
• DataIntersection component now only requires one connected port allowing you easily ignore data sets that you do not need without requiring explicit Trash component.
• Warning and error decorations in CloverDX Designer Navigator view can now be disabled.

CloverDX Server performance improvements
Event listeners can now run parallel jobs, instead of running them in sequence for different triggers. This can improve performance if you have many listeners of the same type.