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Starburst Admin 1.3.1 release

| Kevin Haley , Frank Kuligowski , Annie Elliott

We are delighted to announce the release of Starburst Admin 1.3.1, a follow-on to release 1.3.0. In this post, we cover what’s new since 1.3.0.

Starburst Admin is the best tool choice for folks looking to install Starburst Enterprise platform (SEP) on bare metal or in your virtual machines. Recent updates include:

  • Allow user to specify a custom vars.yml file for Ansible playbooks to use.
  • Allow users to specify the location of custom application configuration files.
  • Enhanced clean up from previous installations.
  • Remove the deprecated discovery-server.enabled configuration property from the config.properties file.

Custom vars.yml file

To improve the flexibility of Starburst Admin, customers are now able to specify a custom vars.yml file. This file contains all settings used by the install playbooks to do things like define the version and define where the configuration settings files can be found. No changes are required for you if you are not yet ready to customize.

More advanced installations may customize the vars.yml file to tune the installation process to meet their needs. These customizations can be tedious to copy from one version install to the next. To make things easier, we’ve introduced a new variable named vars_yml. This variable is used to specify the location of a custom vars.yml file to override the default vars.yml file included with the download.

An example of how to use the vars_yml variable is included in the Starburst Admin install instructions. Also included there are instructions for setting the local_vars variable in your customized vars.yml file to optionally specify a custom location for the coordinator and worker configuration files.

Removing old installs

Some customers who installed a previous version of Starburst Enterprise platform (SEP) were experiencing issues when installing newer versions. In RPM installations for example, there were occasionally empty plugin directories that caused the application to crash when it tried to load an empty plugin. For some tarball installs old installs were not removed, which lead to VMs and bare metal servers running out of disk space.

The install.yml playbook has now been amended to ensure that after installing the new version:

  • any empty plugin directories are removed for rpm installs
  • previous installation directories are removed for tarball installs

Deprecated configuration property

The files/coordinator/config.properties.j2 file included with the Starburst Admin download has default settings for the coordinator’s config.properties file. Previous versions of SEP required that the discovery-server.enabled configuration property be set. This property was deprecated in version 360, however, and the property has now been removed from the config.properties file.

Keep an eye on our Starburst Admin release notes for more details and future updates. And of course, we’d love to hear from you - let us know how we can improve starburst-admin to suit your needs!

Kevin, Frank and Annie