Over the last couple of months as part of our STS (Short Term Support) program, we've rolled out multiple new versions of Portainer with a number of new features, fixes, and updates. We wanted to highlight some of these changes that you may have missed and encourage you to have a look at the STS branch to see what we're working on.
Short Term Support releases are identified with an “STS” suffix and are versions that are supported and maintained until the release of the next STS or LTS version. Use STS versions if you are interested in getting the latest features faster and don’t mind upgrading more frequently.
The latest STS release builds on the previous versions' optimizations to performance to once again increase the responsiveness of the Portainer experience. In particular we've made improvements to search speed on the Home page (useful for those with a lot of environments), along with a raft of improvements to significantly improve the load times of Kubernetes-related pages. We've also moved some of the webhook logic into the background to help to avoid timeouts.
The STS branch brings a small but potentially quite impactful change to how we do our Git clones which should help to reduce the size on disk of those clones. If you're using our Git repository functionality when deploying stacks you may notice a reduction in the amount of disk space used by each clone going forward.
We've made some adjustments to logging and error reporting in the STS branch, specifically in the OAuth and Edge areas. OAuth logs now have increased verbosity which should help with diagnosing issues with authentication timeouts. Edge API calls now report additional information when they error, including the environment ID and name, to aid in better identification when dealing with large numbers of Edge environments.
The STS branch brings official Podman support to Portainer for the first time. While Podman has partially worked in previous versions, there have been some functionality and compatibility issues that we've worked to resolve in this release.
At present we support Podman 5.x on CentOS 9. While other versions of Podman on other Linux distributions may work, we have not fully tested outside of the above options as of yet.
In the STS branch we have made internal changes to the way in which we interact with Docker Compose stacks, removing our reliance on an included Docker Compose binary and moving to a more API-focused approach. As well as reducing our exposure to potential CVEs in third-party binaries, this has resulted in an improvement in performance when using stacks on Docker environments.
To better indicate the status of your Kubernetes nodes, we've added the Conditions column to the Kubernetes node view. This column will display whether any of your nodes are affected by conditions such as DiskPressure, MemoryPressure, PIDPressure or NetworkUnavailable.
We've fixed some of the Kubernetes regressions introduced in previous STS releases. Standard users can now see cluster-scoped ingress controllers, CPU/memory limits and reservation values are now correctly multiplied by replica count, and application rollout restart is once again functional.
The STS branch brings improvements to our Azure Container Instance (ACI) support functionality. During creation you can now select a private virtual network, add tags, volumes, and GPUs. We've also expanded the management capabilities for your ACI workloads by adding stopping and restarting of ACIs as well as viewing of events related to those ACIs.
These are the major new features and changes in the STS branch. For a full list of changes, please refer to our release notes.
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