Just in time for the holidays, the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team is excited to announce our latest v0.5.0 release, which is also our last planned release of the year. 2020 has been a very difficult year for everyone, but looking at the positives, we could not have been happier with the engagement and community contributions that we have received from our user base. I just want to say, THANK YOU to everyone who has used and have shared their feedback on VEBA. We have so much more planned for 2021, cannot wait to share with the community!
While reviewing some of the GitHub commits (changes) for the v0.5.0 release, I had noticed the number of commits in this release has even surpassed our very first v0.1.0 release back in November of last year.
Here is a quick recap of all 6 VEBA releases:
- v0.1.0 (11/25/19) - 351 commits
- v0.2.0 (01/23/20) - 311 commits
- v0.3.0 (03/10/20) - 252 commits
- v0.4.0 (05/11/20) - 191 commits
- v0.4.1 (06/10/20) - 141 commits
- v0.5.0 (11/25/20) - 356 commits
Let’s now take a look at what is new with the v0.5.0 release.
Helm Chart support for VMware Event Router
For customers with an existing Kubernetes cluster, you can now easily deploy the VMware Event Router with just a single command using Helm. For detailed instructions on using the Helm installer, please see the documentation.
VMware Event Router Improvements
- Standardized retry handling across all event processors
- Standardized and (optional) "structured" logging (JSON)
- At-least-once event delivery for vCenter not miss events after a restart or crash
- Simplified configuration via YAML (instead of JSON)
- Extensibility with versioned configuration to support gradual migrations for users
- Bug fixes and internal improvements for increased efficiency and stability
Support for Knative Event Processor
For those not familiar, Knative is an open-source project that was started by Google and builds on top of the Kubernetes platform to easily deploy and manage modern serverless workloads. In fact, several of the founding members of Knative now also work at VMware. They bring their expertise in both co-leading the Knative Steering Committees as well as focus on incorporating this technology into VMware’s own Tanzu portfolio.
When we look at the capabilities that our customers have been asking for, we quickly realized that Knative is both feature rich and that it complements the VEBA solution quite nicely. In addition, the Knative team has also been very supportive of our VEBA efforts internally at VMware, so it was a no-brainer to find a way to collaborate with these awesome folks so that we can help our customers realize the benefits of having an Event-Driven Automation platform.
In this initial release, VEBA will support Knative environments with an externally accessible broker. Customers can use an existing Knative instance or install a new Knative deployment. After selecting the desired event processor as part of the OVF wizard when deploying VEBA, you will then be able to provide your Knative configuration which includes the host/port, protocol scheme, TLS verification and path (if applicable) of the exposed broker.
In a future release, we plan to integrate Knative directly into VEBA where it will become the default event processor. This ultimately will provide customers with a seamless deployment experience whether that is using the appliance form factor or with an existing K8s cluster based on a complete VMware software stack. Knative will also help to bring many of the Enterprise capabilities that you have come to expect from VMware while still maintaining the user experience that many customers have come to rely on as part of the VEBA solution.
New Function Examples
We are very proud of the community that we have built around VEBA, especially with the number of community contributed function examples. Here are just some of the new functions you can now take advantage of, to learn more, please see the function repo documentation.
- Virtual Machine Reconfiguration using vSphere Tags
- HTTP POST to any RESTful API
- Trigger PagerDuty Incident
- vCenter Managed Object Pre-Filter
- Support for Java
Other
- New search capability added to https://vmweventbroker.io/
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