What's new in HPCC Systems 7.10.0 Gold

HPCC Systems is going cloud native and since 7.8.0 Gold, users have been able to take the initial stages of this development work for a test drive.

HPCC Systems 7.10.0 Gold, builds on this cloud native development work as well as providing some additional features that are equally as applicable to our bare metal version. So whichever type of platform you are using there is something for you here.

HPCC Systems Cloud Native Platform

There are a number of blogs available which take you through our development plans for this version of the platform and provide tutorial style instructions to help you get started on various cloud providers:

The following features are now available in the cloud native version of HPCC Systems 7.10.0 Gold.

Adding and Persisting Data

We have started to add some support for Azure Blobs. This development work is in the early stages and there is much more to come in the near future.

By 7.12.0, the plan is to allow a lot more flexibility on where data is stored, including Azure blobs, Azure Data Lake and Amazon S3 buckets. However,  we also want to allow backward compatibility and interoperability with existing bare metal HPCC Systems environments.

To find out more about the planned development in this area and what has already been completed see the following JIRA issues:

Configuration

Security

Usability

  • Bundles can now be named in the Helm chart, which simplifies the process for installing a bundle significantly.

Our cloud native HPCC Systems platform is an ongoing development project. While it isn’t ready for production environments, it is available for you to take a look at how it works, give it a try and contribute to the development process by providing us with some feedback about your experience using our Community Issue Tracker.

General Platform Features and Enhancements in HPCC Systems 7.10.0 Gold

The features and enhancements mentioned in this section are available to users of both our bare metal and cloud native platform versions. Of course, this blog includes the edited highlights only. To see the full list of changes, take a look at the release notes.

Early adopters of our cloud native version can get started setting up a cluster using the blogs shown above.

Our bare metal users can download HPCC Systems 7.10.0 Gold from our website.

DESDL Scripting Enhancements

Major enhancements have been made to the DynamicESDL transformation/integration language. The scripting language now supports explicit parameters and scoped variables, control statements such as:

  • for-each loops and choose with multiple when clauses.
  • The ability to do additional authorization based on contents of the request.
  • The ability to abort the transaction.
  • More ways of modifying the request in flight, and more.

More details are available in these JIRA issues:

Security

  • The STD.Crypto library has been enhanced with four new modules that allow a passphrase to be specified in an ECL DATA parameter:
  • SymmEncryption
  • PKEncryption
  • PKEncryptionFromLFN
  • PKEncryptionFromBuffer

With this enhancement, passphrases can now contain a binary blob, complete with embedded NULL characters.

The Cryptographic Standard Library ECL Module was a new edition to the HPCC Systems platform in version 7.6.x. It provides an assortment of cryptographic features to help ECL developers safeguard sensitive data, using industry standards cryptographic algorithms. More information is available in this blog.

Usability

Performance

What’s next…

As you start using this release, we have already moved on to the next! HPCC Systems 7.12.0 will focus on providing a more complete cloud offering including stronger ROXIE cloud support and more storage options. This release is expected to be available in the Fall.