Arvados 2.2.0 released

June 3, 2021

The Arvados team is pleased to announce Arvados 2.2.0. This release includes a number of bug fixes as well as some new Workbench 2 features. We recommend that new and existing installations of 2.1.2 or earlier upgrade to 2.2.0. See Upgrading Arvados for upgrade instructions.

Major Features

Virtual Projects

Arvados now features virtual projects. These are projects who’s contents are defined by an Arvados query. This enables cross-cutting views that allow you to browse Arvados objects based on alternate criteria than the normal project hierarchy. Virtual projects can also be used to group other projects together to be shared among users with different levels of access, each user only sees the subset of projects in the group that their account is authorized to see.

SSH into Running Container

To help debug compute jobs, Arvados can now create a SSH tunnel to a running Arvados container. This enables you to open a shell session inside a running container, as well as connect to open ports on the container.

Automatic logout and token expiration

To improve token handling security, there are now various options for automatic logout and token expiration.

Workbench plugins

You can now create plugins to add new custom functionality to Workbench 2 and build on the Workbench framework to rapidly develop custom applications on top of Arvados.

Accept OpenID Access Tokens

When configured to use an OpenID Connect identity provider (such as Google, PingFederate, or other systems supporting OIDC), Arvados will accept access tokens issued by that provider in addition to the API tokens issued by Arvados itself. This enables Single Sign On (SSO) integration with other systems.

Cost Reporting

Arvados features two new tools to help collect information about usage and cost.

The cost analyzer produces a report about the cost of compute node time used to run one or more workflows.

The deduplication report prints a report that shows the nominal space used by the collections, as well as the actual size and the amount of space that is saved by Keep’s deduplication.

Guide to using Visual Studio Code with Arvados

The user guide now features a section on [Developing CWL Workflows with VSCode (Arvados | Developing CWL Workflows with VSCode).

User activity report

There is a new arv-user-activity tool which generates a summary report of user activity on an Arvados instance over some time span based on the audit logs.

Other changes

Improved installer

The Saltstack-based installation features improved single-node and multi-node install options.

Improved configuration validation

Now gives improved warnings or errors for invalid configuration options.

Added support for Ubuntu 20.04 (“focal”)

For Arvados 2.2, the supported Linux distributions are Centos 7, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Debian 10.

Dropped support for Debian 9 (“stretch”) and Ubuntu 16.04 (“xenial”)

Debian 9 and Ubuntu 16.04 are no longer supported.

The “devise-omniauth” SSO server is no longer supported

Authentication methods have moved into the Arvados Controller component. Both Workbench 1 and Workbench 2 support direct username/password login (for LDAP) as well third party identity providers. Arvados installations using the “devise-omniauth” SSO server should migrate to one of the built-in authentication methods as soon as possible. See setting up web based login for details.

Fixed bug 17566: request body size was incorrectly limited to 10M

Fixed bug where the request body size was incorrectly limited to 10M when content-type is x-www-form-urlencoded.

Fixed bug 17566: keep-web tolerates superfluous :443 in config.yml

Fixed bug in which keep-web, when configured with explict port numbers, would fail to recognize virtual hosts that did not have explicit port numbers, even when using standard ports :80 or :443.

Thanks,
The Arvados Team

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