Release 1.0.20 brings with it the introduction of hypervisor-level firewalling, improved performance / resource graphs, and various other enhancements and bug fixes.

Summary

Features

  • VM/Network Firewalls

Enhancements

  • Improved performance / resource graphs
  • More reliable virtual console text output
  • Dismissible help boxes throughout the UI
  • Policy limit improvements

Bug Fixes

  • DNS Zones will now sync promptly after they've been verified via the API

Features

VM/Network Firewalls

After a few months in development, we're pleased to announce the launch of a much requested feature - VM and Network firewalls.

Screenshot of the Katapult firewall interface

Based at the hypervisor level, the Katapult firewall enables the creation of incoming and outgoing rules for all public connectivity. Any defined rules are hit and actioned before any virtual machine OS firewall providing an added level of protection.

Firewall source / destinations can be defined against the following:

  • Anywhere
  • Address list
  • Virtual Machine (one of your virtual machines)
  • Group (one of your virtual machine groups)
  • IP Address (or Network - CIDR notation)
  • Tags (one of your resource tags)
  • All virtual machines

For example: You might wish to restrict SSH access solely to the IP addresses of your staff. The solution is to set the rule source to an address list containing the IP addresses of your staff with the destination set as 'all virtual machines' on port 22.

More information on the Katapult firewall feature can be found in the relevant firewalls how-to guide on our public docs site. A few API end points have now been created to enable management of the firewalls from your own applications.

Enhancements

Improved performance & resource graphs

An example CPU usage graph

Performance graphs have had a makeover. Our devs have rebuilt the logic responsible for creating performance / resource graphs and we think they look beautiful! We call the new library, Graphene.

An example network usage graph

P.S. We've decided to release Graphene as an open-source JavaScript library, so you can make use of them in your own applications too!

More reliable virtual console text output

After a few reports of a sluggish console response, we've made some changes behind the scenes to improving the monitoring of incoming SSH data. Terminal / SSH Console access via the Katapult Console is now much more responsive. Thanks for your feedback, keep it coming.

Dismissible help boxes throughout the UI providing a quick explanation of features/pages

We've had a few users ask us what various parts of the Katapult Console do and to aid with these questions we've introduced dismissible help boxes throughout the UI. These provide a quick explanation of various features and offer quick links to the relevant docs pages.

Policy limit improvements

Should you now try to carry out an action which is restricted by the policy set on your organization, then a link will be provided to the organization limits page. This will detail your current usage and the limits in place on your organization.

Bug Fixes

DNS Zones will now sync promptly after they've been verified via the API.

Tell us how you feel about this post?