The whole Cybus team wishes you a happy new year! We hope you have come well into the new year and you had a relaxing and peaceful Christmas holiday. The gingerbread and cookies have been put away and replaced by good resolutions, such as the new Ansible Collection.

That’s why we have been working on removing bugs and improving the performance of Connectware over the new year to become even better and faster. In this newsletter we will briefly explain these improvements. And if you haven’t made any New Year’s resolutions yet, we’ll give you some fresh ideas. 

(January 2021, up to latest release 1.0.71)

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New Year – new improvements

Improved performance and reliability for Beckhoff ADS. Also added ‘struct’ data types and improved configuration.

Improved Admin UI

Improved Admin UI which now shows – amongst many other things – inter-service dependencies on service detail page. Furthermore, enabling and disabling services now also affects other services. 

Password security

A really good New Year’s resolution

We have added a feature to make password assignment within Connectware even more secure. Connectware now allows defining specific password policy rules by setting an environment variable before startup.

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FAVOURITE FEATURE

Jan, Software Engineer

ANSIBLE COLLECTION

“Cybus Connectware offers a rich API for managing everything from user specific data, role assignments to installed services. As the number of implemented use cases and connected systems and devices grows, so does the complexity.

Since this problem applies to IT systems in general, there are well-proven tools available to automate the installation and configuration of systems.

One such tool is Ansible, an open source automation tool created by Red Hat. Cybus provides the Ansible Collection with custom modules to manage each part of the Cybus Connectware deployment, seamlessly integrated into the Ansible workflow. The so-called playbook describes the state in which the system should be set.

This means that not only Connectware commissioning files, but the entire deployment can be version controlled, as it’s all infrastructure as code. Some benefits and possibilities arising from this approach are backup and failover strategies, easy collaboration and traceability of changes.”

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Further improvements:

• Improved start-up timing for Kubernetes and docker-compose
• Improved stability and bug fixes in
  • service handling
  • exception handling on C++ libraries
  • systemstate protocol
  • REST and Kafka endpoint
  • Focas, Modbus and OPC UA protocol
  • Rule Engine

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Our Cybus Dev Team uses a rolling release cycle with weekly updates. This gives us the opportunity to quickly incorporate bug fixes and improvements. So submit your feature request or bug report – and start the countdown.

See you next month!

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