We are happy to announce version 4.0 of the Mist Cloud Management Platform. This major new release brings several new features, performance and usability improvements. It also incorporates the lessons we have learned in the past few months while working with teams that manage thousands of resources, e.g. SevOne.

Mist v4.0 updates

Mist now runs on Python v3.7

Mist v4.0 brings a complete migration from Python v2.7 to Python v3.7. Our goal is to future-proof the code base and take advantage of the latest language improvements.

Thanks to this migration, Mist users will notice considerable improvements in server-side performance.

The migration also allowed us to upgrade to Apache Libcloud v2.4.0 which no longer supports older Python versions. The latest stable version of Libcloud includes many new features for OpenStack, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and DigitalOcean. You can see a full list of changes here.

If you are considering a similar migration for your projects, check out this post with a nice overview of the differences between Python v2.X and Python v3.X. You can find further useful information in the official Python documentation, here and here. Finally, keep in mind that community support for Python v2.7 will expire on January 1st 2020.

Polymer v2.X and Web Components v1

In Mist v4.0 the front-end code is in Polymer v2.X, up from Polymer v1.X. This is the first step towards moving to Polymer v3.X. The goal of this transition is to offer improved browser interoperability and performance. It also allows us to easily upgrade 3rd party components for additional usability improvements.

Migrating from Polymer v1.X to v2.X is not very simple because v2.X introduces breaking changes. Before you try something similar, make sure you check out this excellent upgrade guide. For more information on what Polymer v2.X brings on the table you can check out this document. Since this will probably be a short-term intermediate step before moving to Polymer v3.X, you should also go over the relevant v3.X documents here and here. The good news is that once you're on v2.X moving to v3.X requires less effort than moving from v1.X to v2.X.

Usability improvements

Alongside the major changes mentioned in the previous paragraphs, Mist v4.0 includes several usability improvements to ease your day-to-day routines. The most notable ones are:

i) Searchable key & network selection widgets in forms.

ii) Collapsible sections in monitoring dashboards.

iii) Export machine monitoring dashboard as pdf.

iv) Improved user interaction when adding "Other Server" Clouds.

v) Widget for selecting existing tags.

Adding existing tags to new machines

vi) Configurable filters in every list that persist in localStorage.

Saving custom search filters

vii) Improved display of JSON & XML metadata.

Browsing machine metadata in JSON

Automatic backup & restore scripts

For Mist Community and Enterprise Edition users who are managing their own Mist installations, v4.0 includes a new backup feature. You can now automatically backup and restore everything, including MongoDB and InfluxDB, by making some simple configuration changes.

Pre and post action hooks

Mist v4.0 allows users to set specific pre and post action hooks at the cloud level, e.g. for all resources in my OpenStack cloud. This is useful for users with large infrastructure footprints that require very custom workflows and integrations with 3rd party systems. For example, one of our users is taking advantage of this feature for metering and billing purposes. When a new VM is provisioned a post-action hook notifies the billing system. The same happens after the VM gets destroyed. Based on this information, it is possible to know how many resources were utilized and for how long. This is then translated to an internal cost unit.

Conclusion

Mist v4.0 is a major stable release which brings lots of changes and significant improvements.

Starting today, v4.0 is available on all Mist editions.

For a quick demo, reach out to [email protected] and arrange a video call with one of our engineers.