Current state of the Mender 3.5 release

General Discussions
1

Hey all,

I’m wondering what exactly the current state of the 3.5 release is. I can see the version has been tagged for the helm chart, and the docs have a 3.5 section but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of release notes or anything suggesting it is officially released. Furthermore, the Installing the Mender Helm chart refers to installing 3.5.1 which doesn’t actually seem to exist yet?

From what I gather so far 3.5 has a few features that we’re interested in so I would like to upgrade if possible. I noticed there is now an API that lets you list deployments for a device that previously didn’t exist which would let us remove a bunch of code. Besides that the supported artifact storage types now also seems to include Azure blob storage, which I assume means we can stop using minio and go straight to Azure?

Finally I noticed the Upgrading from 3.4 to 3.5 page as well, which mentions mender now requires OpenSearch for the reporting service which raises a few questions:

  • What exactly is the reporting service?
  • Why the sudden dependency on OpenSearch? Looking at the git history of the reporting service I see it used to reference Elasticsearch, but this was never a dependency either until now. Is this something being brought over from Mender Hosted/Enterprise?
  • Can it be disabled? So far we’ve been happy with mender and how relatively light it is to run in our kubernetes cluster, and having to run OpenSearch kinda puts an end to that. I tried setting reporting.enabled to false as a test, but this immediately seemed to make some DB migration stuff freak out.

We’re staying on 3.4 for now as I’m not sure if 3.5 is officially released yet, and installing OpenSearch would require downtime of our cluster which runs more than just Mender (to set vm.max_map_count). On top of that we need to evaluate if we need to scale our cluster or node types just to meet the requirements of OpenSearch.

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