Announcing ClusterControl 1.8.2: Enhanced Security, Resource Utilization and Administration

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.8.2 of Severalnines ClusterControl  – the only management system you’ll ever need to deploy, monitor, and manage your open source databases.  

ClusterControl version 1.8.2 features new user and LDAP management capabilities for greater security, a new patch management system for easier upgrades, support for PgBouncer (PostegreSQL’s connection pooler) for more efficient use of server resources, and other enhancements. Resources and details follow.

Resources

• Download ClusterControl

• 1.8.2 changelog

• Upgrading ClusterControl

• ClusterControl Documentation

New User and LDAP Management for Enhanced Security

ClusterControl has a new Role Based Access (RBAC) system to manage users  with greater access control, LDAP management, and a centralized user database, all contributing to better and more fine-grained security management options.  

• The user management system is based on the Unix/Linux filesystem permissions model, providing better security in a familiar fashion.

•  You can now create users and teams, controlling their access according to their roles.  Access permissions can be very fine grained, e.g., limited to those with read-access.  

• ClusterControl can be used with the most popular LDAP servers like OpenLDAP or Windows AD for authenticating its users.

• The ClusterControl web application and the command line tool now access the same user database, keeping users of each perfectly in sync. 

• The ClusterControl controller now also uses the improved, secure (encrypted) RPC v2 API that’s been in use by the Severalnines (s9s) command line tool for some time.

New Patch Management

ClusterControl now can upgrade MySQL, PostgreSQL, and ProxySQL nodes through an improved and redesigned patch management system.  With a better user interface and greater reliability,  It shows installed packages and versions, checks/updates for new packages to upgrade, and is capable of selectively upgrading nodes.

PgBouncer Support – connection pooling for PostgreSQL

With support for PgBouncer, ClusterControl users can pool and optimize connections to one or more PostgreSQL databases.  Connection processing is made more efficient, and server resource consumption is reduced when maintaining a lot of server connections to one or more PostgreSQL databases.  

• PgBouncer can be deployed to one or more nodes to manage multiple pools per node.  

• Pool modes can be based on Session, Transaction or Statement.  

• There is also a  Prometheus exporter, which provides metrics for a new PgBouncer dashboard.

Cluster Tags/Labels

You can  now tag or label database clusters to enable quick identification of one or more clusters that are used for a specific purpose.  Tags can be added at cluster deployment or at cluster import.  Cluster management is made easier by searching for or filtering out clusters with specific tags. 

PostgreSQL Support

ClusterControl now supports the most recent major PostgreSQL release, v. 13, for both deployment and import.  It also supports the pgaudit extension to enable audit logging.  And, there are new classes of statements that can be logged (see: https://www.pgaudit.org/).

Miscellaneous

And there’s a bit more…

• MySQL Cluster (NDB) v. 8.0 is now supported.  

• Percona MongoDB 4.x audit log is supported (via ClusterControl command line tool).

  • Note that MySQL’s audit log has already been enabled in a previous release.