2013-08-22

Network Manager

The Network Manager provides you with a single location where you can manage all of your security groups, subnets, and various other network resources. You can couple your infrastructure with the resources you created on your network. With each network resource, you can view audit entries associated to those resources or you can view the audit entires of your entire network. You can also view a network map to see the network resources connected to your deployments.

Note: 

• Currently only AWS is supported.

• This is only available for users on the Unified Cloud Platform. 

For more information on how to create a network and other tasks you can perform with the network manager, see Networks.

New Servers Tab in Deployments (Opt-in Beta)

A redesign of the Servers tab for deployment has been incorporated into the Dashboard. If you would like to view the new redesign, go to a deployment's Servers tab. You will see a purple bar that asks if you would like to try out the new feature. Click Try It Out! You can always revert by clicking Go back to the old version.

The new UI puts Servers and Server Arrays in the same table along with bulk actions. The UI supports filtering that allows for a faster and improved user experience. If you have feedback or suggestions, let us know by filling out the RightScale Servers Beta Feedback form.

Note: This is only available for users on the Unified Cloud Platform. 

Instances in Deployments

You can now add instances to a deployment, change its deployment, or add it a newly created deployment. For more information, see Add Instances to a Deployment.

Note: You need to have a UCP account to use this feature. For more information, see Unified Cloud Platform.

RDS Browser Beta

The RDS Browser for AWS users has been redesigned to allow you to create and configure RDS instances.  With RDS, Amazon manages the database instances, performing backups, handling failover, and maintaining the database software. For more information, see RDS (beta). 

Note: This is only available for users on the Unified Cloud Platform. 

OpenStack Juno Support

RightScale now integrates with OpenStack Juno with support for latest versions of first class components such as Nova, Cinder, Swift, Glance. Support for Neutron (formerly known as Quantum) will be available in October 2013. For information on adding this cloud to your RightScale account and more, see OpenStack Juno.

Private Cloud Connectivity Enhancements

In an effort to reduce Rightscale's IP footprint and decrease firewall and networking ACL complexity, Rightscale has implemented a set of load balancers with fixed IP addresses for outbound instance communication from private clouds. All private cloud administrators should be aware of this change, especially if you have specific outbound firewall rules for instances hosted by a private cloud. You will be required to take action and add explicit firewall rules for these new IPs/Hostnames.

Alerts API

You can now view alert escalations and take actions on alerts through the API. An alert escalation defines the action or set of actions to be taken when specified alert conditions are met. Unlike alerts which are specific to a Server or ServerTemplate, alert escalations can be designated to a specific deployment or made available to all deployments. With the alerts API, you can enable, disable, update, delete, or temporarily disable (squelch) alerts. For more information, see Alert and AlertSpec of the 1.5 Reference API.

Chef Repositories and Cookbooks UI

We have implemented a massive change to the way that the RightScale platform deals with Chef cookbooks. As of this release, users can configure repositories at the account level and import cookbooks into their account for use in ServerTemplates. This behavior mimics the native Chef Server behavior much more closely and removes a RightScale-specific construct known as a RepoPath. It allows for easier management of cookbooks and a more intuitive way to use those cookbooks to build ServerTemplates.

Note: If you were previously using cookbooks with overrides before the release, we migrated all these cookbooks by merging them. So existing ServerTemplates will continue to work as designed.

For more information on how to set up and use these new features, see Repositories and Cookbooks in the Dashboard Users Guide. For insight into why these changes were made, see our blog post, RightScale and Chef Integration. 

API Improvements

With this release, significant changes and improvements have been made to RightScale that also impact the API. With the addition of Unified Cloud Platform, Network Manager, and Cookbooks and Repositories, new Resources and MediaTypes have been added. Additionally, with the inclusion of the Alerts API, there have been modifications to AlertSpecs. For more information about the changes made to the API, see the 2013-22-08 API Change Log.