Availability Updates in RHQ GUI

In older versions, the RHQ GUI showed you the availability status of resources but if you were viewing the resource in the GUI, it did not update the icons unless you manually refreshed the screen.

In RHQ 4.9, this has changed. If you are currently viewing a resource and its availability status changes (say, it goes down, or it comes back up), the screen will quickly reflect the new availability status by changing the availabilty icon and by changing the tree node icons.

To see what I mean, take a look at this quick 3-minute demo to see the feature in action (view this in full-screen mode if you want to get a better look at the icons and tree node badges):

Fine-Grained Security Permissions In Bundle Provisioning

RHQ allows one to bundle up content and provision that bundle to remote machines managed by RHQ Agents. This is what we call the "Bundle" subsystem, the documentation actually titles it the "Provisioning" subsystem. I've blogged about it here and here if you want to read more about it.

RHQ 4.9 has just been released and with it comes a new feature in the Bundle subsystem. RHQ can now allow your admins to give users fine-grained security constraints around the Bundle subsystem.

In the older RHQ versions, it was an all-or-nothing prospect - a user either could do nothing with respect to bundles or could do everything.

Now, users can be granted certain permissions surrounding bundle functionality. For example, a user could be given the permission to create and delete bundles, but that user could be denied permission to deploy those bundles anywhere. A user could be restriced in such a way to allow him to deploy bundles only to a certain group of resources but not others.

Along with the new permissions, RHQ has now introduced the concept of "bundle groups." Now you can organize your bundles into separate groups, while providing security constraints around those bundles so only a select set of users can access, manipulate, and deploy bundles in certain bundle groups.

If you want all the gory details, you can read the wiki documentation on this new security model for bundles.

I put together a quick, 15-minute demo that illustrates this fine-grained security model. It demonstrates the use of the bundle permissions to implement a typical use-case that demarcates workflows to provision different applications to different environments:

Watch the demo to see how this can be done. The demo will illustrate how the user "HR Developer" will only be allowed to create bundles and put them in the "HR Applications" bundle group and the user "HR Deployer" will only be allowed to deploy those "HR Applications" bundles to the "HR Environment" resource group.

Again, read the wiki for more information. The RHQ 4.9 release notes also has information you'll want to read about this.