We are happy to share with you that we just released version 5.3 of Inmanta Service Orchestrator. This minor release introduces a number of noteworthy additions, performance improvements, and bug fixes. The most notable features introduced in this release is partial compiles, scroll-into-view and a new quickstart using Containerlab and SR Linux.
Our documentation includes the upgrade instructions as well as the complete changelog for the Inmanta Service Orchestrator 5.3 release.
Let us highlight what this release brings.
Partial compiles
Typically Inmanta Service Orchestrator takes into account the full service model and all managed service instances to dynamically translate the high-level intent into a desired state that can be enforced into the network. This compilation process offers a lot of confidence and safety because it has the full picture, including interactions between service instances. In this new release, we introduce partial compiles. Instead of going through this whole process for every change, it is scoped to a specific service instance.
The benefit of partial compiles is immediately clear: compile times no longer scale with the amount of service instances, but only with the size of the service model. For large amounts of service instances, this has a huge impact on the compilation time, which in turn greatly increases the responsiveness of service instance creation, deletion and updates.
To guarantee the same level of confidence and safety as the full compiles, it is important that the service model should properly isolate service instances from each other. Our documentation contains modelling guidelines to support you with this.
Concluding, partial compiles allow scaling far beyond what would be feasible with full compiles. Small adjustments to even complex and advanced service models with a lot of service instances can now be done swiftly. For more details on partial compiles, as well as how to enable periodic full compiles (and why you might want to), see the partial compile documentation.
Scroll-into-view
The Web Console provides real-time output of the model compilation process. This release introduces a new feature so that the output in the Web Console tails the logs for improved usability.
New quickstart
We replaced our quickstart with a new one, using Containerlab and SR Linux containers. Have a look and try it out!
We’re looking forward to hear your feedback.
Other changes and improvements
The Inmanta Service Orchestrator 5.3 release also introduces performance and logging improvements across the different components of the orchestrator.