Hi, I'm James from Portainer, and in
this video I'm going to talk about the new features in version 2.19 of Portainer. In 2.18 we worked on improving the
performance of the Portainer interface, and we've done more work on it in 2.19 as
well. We've added the ability to update Portainer from within Portainer itself,
which should make keeping up to date easier. And we've added versioning
to stacks deployed from Portainer. For Edge users, we've brought our popular
GitOps functionality over to Edge Stacks, including webhook, environment
variable and relative path support. We're also introducing staggered deployment
and rollback functionality to Edge Stacks in this release, and improving the way we
display the status of your Edge Stacks. In the Kubernetes space, we've extended
the ability to manage MicroK8s clusters provisioned from Portainer from within the UI.
We've added annotation support for services, and added an option to deploy a manifest
on newly added environments. You can now also require your users to add notes to
your applications before they can deploy. I'll cover all of that in this video, and, of
course, I'll tell you how you can upgrade to 2.19. We've made more improvements to page load
performance in this release, in particular around the Kubernetes applications page. We've
also split the ConfigMaps & Secrets page into two tabs that load separately, which should reduce
load time when you have a large amount of either. There's still more work to be done here, so
you can expect more improvements in the future. Having to drop out to the command line to update
Portainer when a new version comes out has always been a bit of an annoyance, and in 2.19 we've
got rid of that for BE users by letting you update to the latest version right from within the
Portainer UI. Admin users will see a notice and a link they can click on to upgrade Portainer to the
latest version, without needing to do it manually. When using stacks in Portainer, you may
sometimes make a change that doesn't quite work as you expect. With 2.19, we've added stack
versioning to Portainer, which lets you keep a record of your previous stack configuration when
deploying an update. If you run into issues, you can roll back to the previous stack
configuration that Portainer kept for you. This is available for both Docker
Standalone and Docker Swarm stacks. Way back in version 2.10 of Portainer
we added GitOps support for stacks, letting you deploy from a Git repo
directly onto your environment. In 2.19, we've brought that support to Edge Stacks as
well, meaning you can use Git as the source of truth for your Edge Stack deployments. This
includes support for webhooks to trigger updates on your Edge Stacks, relative path support,
and support for environment variables. As part of this we've also introduced an
Edge Configurations section. This feature lets you pre-deploy configuration files
to your Edge devices, either by group or by specific device identifier, to
a location that your stacks will be able to refer to. This means you can keep
your Edge stack repos thin and performant, while still letting you provide the necessary
config files to get your app up and running. If you've got a large number of
Edge Devices you're deploying to, you might not always want to push an update to
every one of them at once, in case something goes wrong. With 2.19 you can now stagger your
Edge Stack deployments to suit your needs. You can either choose a static number of devices to
update concurrently, or update your deployment exponentially in growing groups. You can set
the timeout and delay for your deployments, and choose how to act if the update fails, including
whether to roll back to the previous version. Alongside the staggered deployment functionality,
we've also put some work into improving the way we display the status of your Edge Stacks.
We've moved to using progress bars to display the amount of deployments at each status,
letting you clearly see the state of your Edge Stack across your devices. We've also
added a record of when each device reached each status through the Environments tab on
the Edge Stack's details page, as well as the target and deployed versions of the Edge Stack
as part of the new stack versioning feature. In version 2.18 we added provisioning of
MicroK8s directly on to fresh machines from within Portainer. In 2.19 we've
extended the functionality around managing MicroK8s environments deployed
this way, adding support for upgrading, scaling and deleting nodes in the cluster,
the enabling and disabling of addons after provisioning, as well as being able to
customize arguments for your addons. You can also now specify which nodes should
be control planes when provisioning, and we've refreshed the provisioning workflow
to take advantage of the new functionality. Portainer now supports configuring annotations
for Kubernetes services from the UI, alongside the other areas that already
supported annotations in previous versions. Annotations are particularly useful when
configuring service meshes and other tools. When you're deploying a new Kubernetes
environment, you may want to run an "initial setup" manifest on the environment
to get it configured the way you want it. With 2.19 you can now specify a manifest to
automatically deploy when you provision a new Kubernetes environment or add the Portainer
Agent to an existing Kubernetes cluster. This lets you pre-configure things like namespaces,
secrets and anything else you need automatically. In larger organizations (and even smaller
ones), if you have a lot of deployments it might be hard to keep track of what each one
is for. In 2.19 we've added a configuration option to enforce the setting of notes on
new deployments. Using this you can require that your team adds a description
to every deployment they push out, making it easier to find detail
on the deployment down the line. These are the big features and changes in
2.19, but there’s also a ton of other changes and fixes in this release. Have a look at our
release notes for the full list of changes. If you're doing a fresh install of
Portainer on a production environment, I'd recommend working through our best
practice install guide in the Portainer Academy at academy.portainer.io. This will guide
you through what you need to run Portainer, how to install it, as well as what
we'd recommend for production setups. For a quicker setup process you can use
our documentation at docs.portainer.io. Upgrade guides for both CE and BE are
also available in our documentation, as well as instructions for
upgrading from CE to BE. Thanks for watching! I hope I've
been able to show you some of the new features and updates in Portainer 2.19
- if you do have any questions, need help, or would like more information on anything
I've talked about here please check out our documentation, join our community support
channels, or get in touch with us directly.
