Platform 6

📣 It's Here! Itential's Newest Software, Platform 6 📣

Ready to learn all about Platform 6? Everything to know is provided here. So read on!

New Release Versioning

We are excited to announce the feature launch of our brand new Itential Platform version, Platform 6.0.0! Get ready to experience next level automation and orchestration for network infrastructure that makes it easier to work within Itential Platform.

The key objectives behind the launch of Platform 6 focus on Security, Support, and Simplification for Itential customers.

• Security: Itential has reworked the platform’s backend to align with today’s cutting-edge technology, resulting in improved Platform performance and enhanced security.

• Support: Customers can now more easily self-service their use cases with a robust Integrations engine that offers expanded authorization and authentication support while providing detailed responses to assist in troubleshooting broken integrations. LCM has also been enhanced to offer an audit trail, showing customers how information has changed over time within an instance.

• Simplification: Enhancements to Projects empower users by alerting users to missing, corrupted, or altered references within their destination environments. Additionally, Projects has been simplified with a robust reference management system supporting the intelligent remapping of child jobs, transformations, forms, and other assets when moving, copying, or renaming projects and their components. Platform Installation and Startup has also been simplified with the platform now supporting the RPM Package Management System and simplified configuration. The RPM package manager brings management of Itential dependencies (Python and Node) to the installation process (excludes Redis and Mongo), and removes the requirement for pre-startup configuration scripts. Platform configuration has been expanded to support configuration via Environmental Variables, on-disk data configuration file, or database.

Featured Improvements

The following provides an overview of the features offered to customers as part of Itential Platform 6:

Integrations

The next generation of Integrations in Platform 6 expands authentication support, enabling customers to transition from Adapters to Integrations with fewer demands on system resources.

• Expanded support for global headers and parameters, with the ability to define query parameters, headers, and cookies across the Integrations.
• Ability to directly connect with external systems with additional OpenAPI 3.1 authentication and authorization, including support for Mutual TLS, OAuth2.0 Grant Flows, and OpenID Connect.
• Dynamic API Keys to improve the security of asset retrieval.
• Improved UI/UX with more detailed information provided within Integration responses to support troubleshooting.
• Simplified integration responses to ensure the information that customers need is easier to locate, and the return payload size is kept to a minimum.

Lifecycle Manager

Lifecycle Manager (LCM) in Platform 6 enables customers to efficiently automate and manage large numbers of LCM instances.

• Customers can fully automate the creation, management, and deletion of LCM instances, reducing manual work and complexity.
• With Instance Groups, customers can perform actions against multiple instances at the same time, removing the limitation of addressing each instance separately.
• Customers now have the ability to track changing properties within instances and the flow of instance data across time.
• By integrating LCM with Operations Manager, customers can now set triggers for Lifecycle Resource Models and actions.

Projects

Platform 6 brings intuitive and intelligent reference management when importing assets into Projects, with better understanding to what a Project is referencing, especially between environments.

• With automatic discovery and remapping of references, manual rework has been eliminated. Customers can automatically discover and import all references from an imported asset, ensuring they have transparency into the function of a project.
• Upon import to a new environment, all external project references are validated within the new system. This ensures reference consistency across environments and prevents unexpected behavior during project promotion.

Core Enhancements

Itential has made major improvements to the Platform Core, with further enhancements to Platform security, reliability and performance.

• Implemented HashiCorp AppRole methods to support authentication between Itential Platform and HashiCorp Vault.
• Removed Angular to enhance Itential Platform stability, performance, and security.
• Implemented user defined encryption keys and key rotation to enhance user security.
• Implemented new Device Counts within Admin Essentials to easily see how many devices are connected to Itential Platform.
• Added new Server.apiread or Server.admin user roles to access the advanced Configuration view (service config editor) inside Admin Essentials.

Platform Infrastructure

To deliver a higher quality software, Itential has improved how we build, test, and distribute Itential Platform.

• Expanded suite of automated testing.
• Increased automation to reduce the manual process required to build Itential Platform while ensuring compatibility against supported operating systems (AL23, Rocky 8/9, RHEL 8/9).
• Improved artifact distribution with customer access to RPM files, VM Disk Images, Container Images.
• Improved customer access control to artifact distribution with token-based authentication.
• Enhanced auditing and tracking in artifact distribution that provides Itential visibility into artifact usage and downloads.

Startup & Configuration

To simplify the experience of installing, configuring and completing a first-time-run of Itential Platform, the number of steps to configure and startup have been reduced. Customers can essentially configure once and deploy to multiple locations, and update more frequently with less downtime.

• Consolidated the information required for Itential Platform startup into a single location properties file.
• Enabled the ability to configure Itential Platform entirely through environmental variables.
• Implemented default values. Itential Platform will insert intelligent default values if customers do not fully configure their system.
• Enabled user setup in Itential Platform with a default user, even if an AAA adapter is not configured or installed.
• Enhanced the first time run experience by enabling the configuration of Itential Platform and local AAA via UI.
• Enhanced native support and usability of containerized and virtualized environments.
• Customers can now select the deployment method that suits their infrastructure needs. Itential Platform will be distributed via RPM files, Container Images, and VM Disk Images.

Major Deprecations

Deprecations and removals in Platform 6 are listed below. Please follow the guidance that's provided to maintain Itential Platform's functionality and performance.

Itential Resources

To discover more about Itential Platform, be sure to visit:

• Itential.com
• Itential's Developer Tools
• Itential's YouTube Channel