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Release 1.9.0 (January 29, 2010)

• AWS EC2 West Region Support: Added support for AWS EC2 West Region
• Color Coded XML Editor: Added online color coded editor to simplify the editing of system definition files by advance users
• AWS EC2 EBS Boot Instance Support: Added support for EC2 instances using EBS for booting. EBS boot instances, can be included in the n-tier system by adding optional information to the awsServer tag. Setting terminateOnStopInstance false ensures that the server is stopped and not terminated

<serverType role="default" min="1" max="2" >
 <awsServer>
 ..................
 ..................
 <securityGroup></securityGroup>
 <keypair></keypair>
 <rootDeviceType>ebs</rootDeviceType>
 <terminateOnStopInstance>false</terminateOnStopInstance>
 <machineIdentifier>ami-df6489b6</machineIdentifier>
 ..................
 ..................
 </serverType>

• • Note if you specify an EBS instance in the system definition and start the system, by default instance is launched the first time (i.e. new instance id and IP is assigned). On subsequent starting of the system EBS boot instances in the system are started with the same instance id that was assigned during the first time launching of the system. If you want to terminate or bundle the EBS boot instance you have to use the DashBoard. Unlike stopping, terminating the instance removes the results releasing of the IP and instance ID for the instance. Current support of EBS boot instances doesn’t support scale up or auto-recovery

• Monitoring support for custom images (images not provided by Kaavo): Added automatic installation of monitoring agents on servers with Linux OS. This will allow users to use any custom Linux images without being limited to the use of Kaavo provided images. All flavors of Linux are supported. By default, any time a Linux OS based server is launched, IMOD checks if the monitoring agent is installed on the server, if the agent is not installed IMOD installs the agent. If users don’t want the monitoring agent to be installed on the server, they can disable the default behavior by adding the optional flag agentSetup="manual” for the serverType

<serverType role="default" min="1" max="4" agentSetup="manual">

• • Note it is not possible to set flags on individual servers. serverType(a group of servers of the same role) is the lowest granularity to specify flags

• Updated Rackspace sample System Definition: Updated the Kaavo provided sample Rackspace system definition by removing the action for installing the monitoring agent. As IMOD now support automatic installation of monitoring agents on all flavors of Linux for all integrated cloud providers, install monitoring action for installing and configuring the monitoring agent is no longer required in the system definition file

• Enhanced support for debugging custom actions: IMOD now logs exit code for the actions executed on the servers over SSH in the application centric system logs accessible from the LOG tab for the deployed systems. This gives users more visibility to the configuration and run-time management tasks. Also for debugging users can add the verbose flag to display up to last 10 lines of the message generated from the actions executed on the servers in the application centric logs. Detailed messages are logged on the servers in the same directory where the actions were executed in the log files for the corresponding actions (<action-name>.log)

<serverType role="default" min="1" max="4" logMode="verbose"> 

• Ability to connect to servers as a non-root user: Some images don’t allow users to connect as root user over SSH. The non-root username can be configured for IMOD engine to connect to the server by setting the sshUser attribute in the server tag.

<serverType role="default" min="1" max="2" >
 ............................
 ............................
 <sshUser>ubuntu</sshUser>                     
 ............................
 ............................
</serverType>

• Ability to manage servers without SSH connectivity: Sometime users only want to launch the servers and don’t want to connect to the server over SSH or have firewall rules to not allow IMOD to connect to certain servers over SSH. Users can now bring up multi-server systems using IMOD without IMOD engine waiting for SSH connectivity by just adding the optional checkSSH=”false” flag to the startup timeout in the server tag

<serverType role="default" min="1" max="2">
 <awsServer>
  ............................
  ............................
  <startupCount>1</startupCount>  
   <workflow>
    <startup timeout="300" checkSSH="false">
  ............................
  ............................
</serverType>

• List of server attributes available to the velocity engine: Published the list of server attributes that can be used within the velocity templates for dynamically generating scripts, code, or configuration files in any programming language. Please refer to the n-tier guide List of Server Attributes Available to Velocity Templates section for details.

Release 1.8.0 (December 10, 2009)

• System Definition Schema: On popular request we have released the XML schema for the IMOD System Definition File. Please note as we add new providers and functionality we will continue to enhance the XML schema, we will maintain the latest production schema at https://imod.kaavo.com/imod-system-definition-schema.xsd. For additional information on System Definition also refer to the N-tier System Definition Guide
• UI Wizard: Added UI Wizard to make it is easy to define and configure a system from scratch, view the video tutorial for more information
• Import/Export Deployments:Added Ability to export and import System Definitions to and from the local drive
• Monitoring Enhancements:
  • Added ability to view monitoring data for free swap memory and used swap memory
  • Added ability to view monitoring data for last 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour
• Deployment Timeout Handling:Added ability to handle timeout conditions during deployment and server configuration by adding onTimeout attribute in the server startup workflow tag <startup timeout="300" onTimeout="Continue"/>
  • onTimeout="Abort" means the server will be shutdown and the rest of the system will continue
  • onTimeout="Continue" means the server will not be shutdown but still the rest of the system will continue
  • If we do not specify any onTimeout attribute, it will act according to the current default behavior, i.e. the tier and the system deployment will timeout and users have to manually abort the system and retry the deployment after addressing the issue responsible for the workflow timeout. See the following example of how to configure this within the serverType tag:

<serverType role="loadbalancer" min="1" max="8">
    ...............................
    ...............................
    ...............................
    <startupCount>2</startupCount>
    <workflow>
              <startup timeout="1200"  onTimeout="Continue"></startup>
              <shutdown/>
    </workflow>
    ...............................
    ...............................
</serverType>

Release 1.7.0 (November 2, 2009)

• Added ability to search application-centric system logs
• Added ability to schedule events to allow users to automatically execute application centric complex workflows for n-tier systems at the scheduled time; the scheduler basically triggers the event at the scheduled time and IMOD engine execute the corresponding workflow associated with the event
  • Ability to schedule complex or simple maintenance tasks to be performed automatically at the scheduled time, e.g. application specific backups, execution of application specific batch jobs, etc.
  • Ability to start/stop complex n-tier systems at the scheduled time

Release 1.6.0 (October 14, 2009)

• Added support for Rackspace Cloud, IMOD now supports following for Rackspace:
  • Application Centric n-tier configuration: With one click, IMOD automatically brings online one or multi-server systems, configures middleware, deploys application/workload, and starts all dependent services in a specified order
  • Automation: Ability to automate complex workflows to handle run-time production exceptions without human intervention
  • Monitoring and alerts: Users can monitor resources used by their applications and set up alerts to proactively manage application service levels
  • Application Centric Accounting: Ability to track usage of all servers used by an application so app owners know exactly the usage of resources for their application.
  • Example system definition for managing deploying and managing applications on Rackspace cloud
• Example system definition for deploying and managing Bitnami Images
• Added support for specifying Kernal Images and Ram Disk for Amazon EC2 servers. This will allow users over-ride Kernel (AKI) and RamDisk (ARI) for an image without having to rebundle the image. Following optional tags can be added to the Amazon Server type definition in the System Definition:
  • <kernelImage>aki-20c12649</kernelImage>
  • <ramDisk>ari-21c12648</ramDisk>

Release 1.5.0 (August 31, 2009)

• Custom Events: Event definition for triggering scale-up scale-down, recovery, or custom events can be defined from the drop down menu on the monitoring page even when the system (Application infrastructure) is not running. Events can be persisted, i.e. no need to redefine them on restarting the system
• Enhanced the format for defining automation (custom workflows) to give more flexibility to users. Going forward use this new format for defining, scale-up, scale-down, recovery, and any custom workflows as we will deprecate the older format
• Application Centric Logging: Added system level logging to have seperate logs for each deployed application infrastructure by adding new tab for system logs. This gives more transparency to each application owner on SLAs of the resources used by their application
• Application Centric Accounting: Added ability to track infrastructure usage for each managed application individually. This allows application owners to know the usage of resources by their application when multiple applications are deployed in the same account

Release 1.4.6 (July 09, 2009)

• Signed the code for SSH applet to prevent the unsigned warning message
• Implemented upper and lower limits on the number of servers based on server type in each tier to allow users to prevent auto-scaling up or auto-scaling down beyond the specified range
• Enhanced the 3 tier LAMP stack example system template to include auto-recovery event to recover the server and configure it automatically in the context of the application in case any of the servers dies
• Added quick start user guide for beginners

Release 1.4.5 (June 03, 2009)

• Automation for run-time service level management
  • Ability to add system level alerts
  • Ability to define custom events at system level
  • Ability to automatically execute custom actions in response to custom events
• Additional images for EU location
• Updated n-tier documentation
• Added example system definition template for Ruby on Rails

Release 1.4.4 (April 15, 2009)

• European region support
• Windows support
  • 256-bit encryption of elastic block storage for windows
  • monitoring support for windows
  • Kaavo public windows images (with out-of-the-box support for encryption and monitoring)
• Billing/Accounting system
  • Track your instance usage
  • View monthly billing information
• A LAMP stack example NTier system defintion file is available as a new Template. This example uses the php-colab application as an example. In this system, we have two Apache based front-end load-balancers (load-balanced via DNS round-robin), a php based application-tier, and a MYSQL cluster database back-end.

Release 1.4.2 (Feb 17, 2009)

• Added support for scale-up/scale-down in the system definition files. Now you can setup scale-up and scale-down actions to dynamically add more servers to a running system when the needed, and also to reduce the servers when the demand goes down.
• Kaavo public images are shown at a separate tab on the dash-board.
• Significant Performance improvements for the Graphical User Interface

GA Release - 1.4 (January 12, 2009)

• N-Tier: World's first application-centric, n-tier cloud computing automation
  • Ability to define a complete n-tier system in XML system definition file (SDF)
  • Launch a multi-tier system consisting of many servers using a single-click
  • Clone an entire system via single-click (e.g. clone DEV system to QA system)
  • Easily deploy a system starting from a template. Half a dozen system templates are provided as examples, ranging from a simple single-tier system with a java application on it, to a 3-tier system consisting of a MYSQL Cluster database, a JBOSS application server tier, and an Apache web-tier.
• Security: Full 256-bit security
  • Full volume level encryption, with elastic block storage volumes. You can create dynamic encrypted volumes, and attach them to running instances. All data on these volumes is encrypted.
  • Support for delegated users. Users in different roles have different access-levels to the application.
• Monitoring: Out-of-box support for monitoring your instances.
  • Monitor real-time graphs of the vitals (CPU, Memory, Disk Space, Bandwidth etc.)
  • Setup rule-based trigger alerts (e.g. "Notify me when used Disk Space goes above 70%")
• Automated Backups: Support for automated backups
  • Backups are scheduled via a scheduling service to backup automatically (daily, weekly, monthly etc.)
  • Support for automatic rotation of the backups, to limit the total snapshots.
• Kaavo Images: More than a dozen Kaavo images, that provide out-of-the-box:
  • 256-bit encryption
  • Pre-installed monitoring agents
  • Various flavors of Linux, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions
• Other:
  • Built-in secure command-shell to connect to any instance over ssh.
  • Built-in secure ftp (s-ftp)
  • Fully functional tradition dashboard for instance-level management

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