New Features of the Solution Manager 8.0 GA¶
This section lists the new features of Solution Manager 8.0 GA (with no updates).
To read about the new features of the latest updates, read the What Is New in Denodo… of the New Features Guide.
Automated Deployments¶
The Solution Manager now can automate the deployment of the Denodo Platform on Amazon AWS. That is, it automates:
Creation and management of clusters: choose the type of EC2 instance, number of EC2 instances in the cluster, etc.
Creation of load balancers and Auto Scaling groups.
Installation and launch of the Denodo servers.
Installation of Denodo updates on clusters with several servers, without downtime.
In Denodo 8.0 GA, enable SSL in the Denodo servers.
The main benefit is that you can instantiate and manage your entire AWS deployment without having to create and configure custom AWS elements and without SSH connections to each individual server to configure various settings.
To automate the installation and launch of the Denodo Platform servers, the Solution Manager requires a service account for AWS provided by your organization. That way, the Solution Manager automates the deployment of the Denodo Platform with the benefit that all the infrastructure is still under the control of your organization and no one outside your organization can access it.
Currently, the Solution Manager automates this on Amazon AWS. It is on the roadmap for version 8.0 to add the same support for Microsoft Azure. In the meantime, you can run the Denodo Platform on Azure but the deployment is not automated.
Single Point of Access¶
The Solution Manager now can work as the single point of access to these applications of Denodo:
Data Catalog
The new Design Studio
Scheduler
Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool
Non-administrators can log into the Solution Manager and depending on their privileges, they will be shown links to the applications they have the right to access.
In version 7.0, this functionality is partially provided by the Web Panel.
Authentication and Authorization¶
New Authentication Protocols and Single Sign-On¶
The Solution Manager can be integrated with many identity providers with the new support for these authentication protocols:
SAML 2.0
OAuth 2.0
OpenID
Kerberos
In addition, the Solution Manager now provides single sign-on capabilities. That is, once users log in to the Solution Manager, they can access the applications listed above (Design Studio, Data Catalog…) without having to enter their credentials again. Therefore, if you configure single sign-on on the Solution Manager, users can access the Data Catalog with SAML authentication even though Data Catalog itself does not support SAML authentication.
Privileges System Extended¶
The Solution Manager now provides more fine grained privileges that allow the administrators to control what tasks users can do over each environment. For example, in version 7.0, users with the privilege solution_manager_promotion_production can deploy revisions to all the production environments (i.e. those whose License scenario is production). In version 8.0, the administrators can grant the privilege of deploying revisions to only certain environments.
See more about this in the section Authorization of the Solution Manager Administration Guide.
Unified User Interface to Manage Roles and Privileges¶
Now you can manage the authentication and authorization of users from the Solution Manager Administration Tool. That is, from this tool, you can create users and roles, assign and revoke roles to users, enable Kerberos authentication, change LDAP settings, etc. The Solution Manager still uses the Virtual DataPort server of its installation as the engine to authenticate and authorize users. The difference is that in version 8.0, you no longer need to connect to Virtual DataPort directly to do all this.
Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool of the Solution Manager¶
Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool Populates Servers Automatically¶
Now, the Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool automatically populates the list of servers with the servers registered on the Solution Manager. Therefore, administrators no longer have to register manually the Virtual DataPort servers of their organization on this tool.
This applies to both Denodo servers created by the Automated Mode of the Solution Manager, and the ones registered manually.
This applies to the Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool of the Solution Manager, not the one of the installation of the Denodo Platform. In the installation of the Denodo Platform, you have to define the servers to monitor manually.
Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool Starts Automatically¶
When you start the component Solution Manager Administration Tool, the Diagnostic & Monitoring Tool starts automatically.