The Arvados team is pleased to announce Arvados 3.2.0. This release introduces support for web services in containers, external service credentials, and collection downloads as ZIP files, as well as a new Workbench dashboard and bug fixes throughout the platform. We recommend that existing installations of 3.1.2 or earlier upgrade to 3.2.0. See Upgrading Arvados for instructions.
Service Containers
Arvados 3.2.0 introduces service containers. Users can describe web services that run from their CWL workflow steps or API container requests. Arvados will let users connect to those web services while the container is running. This can be useful to run interactive analysis on data in Keep or connect to diagnostics for a long-running analysis step.
Workbench lets you connect to these services right from the top of the process page. Custom clients can also get the service URLs from the API. There are options to control who can access the services. Our user guide has an end-to-end demonstration of how to use service containers.
External Service Credentials
Arvados 3.2.0 introduces a credentials store. Credentials can store arbitrary secrets for resources and APIs outside Arvados and use them to access data for compute on demand.
We are using this to make it easier to analyze data in S3. When you submit a workflow to Arvados that uses s3 URLs in the inputs, the workflow runner will automatically search Arvados’ credentials for an access token to use to download that data to Keep on your behalf. This should eliminate the need to manually transfer data from S3 to Keep in most cases. Our user guide explains how to set up and use S3 access tokens.
We’ve built the credentials API to be extensible and avoid leaking secrets. You are welcome to use it in your own Arvados tooling. We’d love to hear your ideas for other kinds of credentials we can officially support.
Collection ZIP File Download
Keep lets you download multiple files or all the files from one collection as a single ZIP file. This streamlines your ability to download and analyze an entire set of outputs or logs. You can get a ZIP file from the collection file view in Workbench or from the WebDAV API.
New Workbench Navigation
When you log into Workbench, you’ll be greeted with our new dashboard. This puts your favorites, recently viewed projects, and recent workflow runs front and center, giving you instant access to the projects you’re working on right now. We’ve also streamlined navigation by giving collections, processes, and workflows a tab-based view just like projects have.
Deployment Changes
Arvados 3.2.0 introduces support for installation on AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and RHEL 9.
For clusters installed on AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, or RHEL 8, Arvados 3.2.0 requires packages from the 8.8 release. Make sure your servers have at least this version before you upgrade Arvados.
Arvados 3.2 no longer supports Debian 11 “bullseye” or Ubuntu 20.04 “focal.” Arvados 3.1 supports Debian 12 “bookworm” and Ubuntu 22.04 “jammy.” You can upgrade your Arvados cluster to one of those releases, then proceed to upgrade Arvados.
And More
There are plenty of smaller new features and bug fixes throughout this release. For all the details, check out our full release notes.