Landscape News

We are pleased to announce the availability of Landscape 1.4.0!

This version includes new features such as Eucalyptus cloud management and package activities sceduling as well as some polishing. Read on for details.

New features

In Landscape we always work at the same time in new features as well as in improving existing ones. Here are the new features for this release:

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Not only can Landscape interact with Amazon’s EC2 service, you can now use Landscape to handle instances in your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, based on Eucalyptus. All the features that work with EC2 also work with UEC, such as instance start/stop, Elastic Block Storage and others. All you need to do is provide the URL to the UEC endpoint and the cloud credentials:

UEC being defined

Scheduling

In this development cycle we started implementing scheduling in Landscape. For now, it’s only available for package activities and reboot and shutdown of computers, but expect this to be improved in the next few minor releases:

Scheduling a package activity

Access Groups

Access Groups allow us to restrict the computers to which selected administrators will have access to. Administrators that belong to an access group can only manage the machines in the same access group.

For example, if we had an access group called “devel”, administrators belonging to this group would only be able to manage the machines that also belonged to the “devel” group.

We want to make some last minute improvements to this feature, so it will only be available next week on November 2nd, 2009, but here is a sneak preview:

Preview of access groups

Ajax

It started small, with just a few icons showing the status of the EC2 instances in the computer page, but now we have Ajax all over the place in the user interface. This improves the user experience and makes Landscape faster and more robust.

Improvements

Landscape is always evolving, and we like to take care of existing features as well as introduce new ones. This time we paid considerable attention to packaging.

Package search

The package search page, which is central to all package activities, now uses a better search algorithm. Exact and more prominent matches are displayed first, and we got rid of the limitation of three characters at a minimum for a filter:

Improved search

Packaging User Interface

This has been in place already, but we would like to highlight it again. The new package interface can now handle upgrades, downgrades, new installations and removals all at the same time, in one place. Not only that, it also handles different versions of each package per computer and groups them all under the package name.

For example, before, when searching for a package called “postfix” among five different Ubuntu distributions, we would get one result for each version of “postfix”. Now it’s all grouped together under the “postfix” name, making the page much simpler to work with:

Dealing with four different versions of a package at the same time

Now a task like “install postfix on these four different Ubuntu machines” suddenly became much simpler: instead of 4 clicks (one for each version), it’s just one click away.