Release Notes

Welcome to the Akamas 3.6.0 release notes! This update is another step in the journey to improve user experience and simplify the use of Akamas in many different contexts. Let's jump into the core improvements of this release.

Study Resume

We received a lot of feedback from customers who would like to interrupt study execution and resume it again at a later time to cope with shared performance environments or environment configuration freeze periods. For this reason, we have complemented the ability to stop a running study, already available in previous versions, to also resume it at any given time. This allows for greater flexibility in coping with schedule changes.

File Configurator template customization

The file configurator operator is one of the most commonly used operators of workflows. It allows to actualize configuration file templates with the parameter values optimized by Akamas. Each technology comes with a set of parameters that are applied with a specific format, this information is already included in Optimization Packs and allows the file configurator operator to work out of the box. In some scenarios, user-defined practices or other configuration tools (e.g. helm charts, ansible playbooks) override the default way to set a parameter. To improve the experience in this scenario, the file configurator operator allows now to override the way a parameter is substituted in order to specify any custom format.

Permissive baselines

Offline studies can now start their exploration from any baseline configuration, even if it does not fulfill the constraints defined in the study. This helps to explore different parameter regions with respect to the one already used by the system and quickly compare them.

Live studies still need a baseline configuration that respects parameter constraints but can not start from baselines that do not completely fulfill goal constraints. This allows you to start optimizing applications that are also experiencing some response time or resource utilization spikes for a limited time.

Telemetry troubleshooting

Troubleshooting telemetry instance integration is an activity that is often performed during the initial study setup. To simplify this activity all telemetry instances are now automatically executed with the highest log level. You can now filter for different log levels directly in the UI. The UI will also highlight failed telemetry instances and direct you straight to the error message to speed up troubleshooting and get to the optimization faster.