Platform 6.0.0 feature announcement

Platform 6.0.0 is a major release that introduces semantic versioning, a rearchitected integrations engine, Lifecycle Manager enhancements, intelligent project reference management, and significant security and infrastructure improvements. For a complete list of features, enhancements, and bug fixes, see the Platform 6.0.0 release notes.

The key objectives behind Platform 6 focus on security, support, and simplification for Itential customers.

• Security: Itential has reworked the platform’s backend to align with current technology, resulting in improved performance and enhanced security.
• Support: Customers can 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. LCM has also been enhanced to offer an audit trail, showing how information has changed over time within an instance.
• Simplification: Enhancements to Projects empower users by alerting them to missing, corrupted, or altered references. Projects has also been simplified with a robust reference management system supporting intelligent remapping of child jobs, transformations, forms, and other assets when moving, copying, or renaming. Platform installation has been simplified with RPM package management and streamlined configuration, including support for environmental variables, on-disk configuration files, and database configuration.

Featured improvements

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 integrations.
• Direct connection to external systems with additional OpenAPI 3.1 authentication and authorization, including support for Mutual TLS, OAuth 2.0 grant flows, and OpenID Connect.
• Dynamic API keys to improve the security of asset retrieval.
• Improved UI/UX with more detailed information within integration responses to support troubleshooting.
• Simplified integration responses to ensure the information customers need is easier to locate, with reduced return payload size.

Lifecycle Manager

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

• Fully automate the creation, management, and deletion of LCM instances, reducing manual work and complexity.
• With Instance Groups, perform actions against multiple instances simultaneously, removing the limitation of addressing each instance separately.
• Track changing properties within instances and the flow of instance data across time.
• Set triggers for Lifecycle Resource Models and actions by integrating LCM with Operations Manager.

Projects

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

• Automatic discovery and remapping of references eliminates manual rework. Customers can automatically discover and import all references from an imported asset, ensuring 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 security, reliability, and performance.

• Implemented HashiCorp AppRole methods to support authentication between Itential Platform and HashiCorp Vault.
• Removed Angular to enhance 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 inside Admin Essentials.

Platform infrastructure

To deliver 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 and 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 and configuration

To simplify the experience of installing, configuring, and completing a first-time run of Itential Platform, the number of steps to configure and start up have been reduced. Customers can 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 properties file.
• Enabled the ability to configure Itential Platform entirely through environmental variables.
• Implemented default values — Itential Platform inserts intelligent default values if customers do not fully configure their system.
• Enabled user setup 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.
• Itential Platform is distributed via RPM files and container images.

Product showcase

Major deprecations