Virtuozzo Application Platform 4.3 / 4.4

This document is preliminary and subject to change.

In this document, you will find all of the new enhancements and visible changes included in the PaaS 4.3 and 4.4 releases:

• Improvements
• Bug Fixes

For detailed information on using any of the platform’s features, please refer to the users' documentation.

Improvements

External IPs Swap via CLI
PHP 7 Support (4.3 / 4.4)
MongoDB Driver for PHP Update
PHP Modules List Refactoring (4.3 / 4.4)
OpenSSL Update
Node.js Engine Update
Software Stack Versions

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External IPs Swap via CLI

In the current Platform update, the functionality of platform CLI was complemented with a new method, that allows to swap external IP addresses among two nodes or, in case one of them does not have its own Public IP bounded, to transfer an address to another instance. Herewith, this operation can be handled for any nodes within the confines of a single account, i.e. even for the ones, that belong to different environments or run different services. So, in order to accomplish this, just a single line of code should be run:

1

~/jelastic/environment/control/swapextips --envName  {env_name} --srcnodeid  {src_node_id} --dstnodeid {dst_node_id}

This command requires the following values to be specified within the highlighted parameters:

• {env_name} - name of the environment, which comprises the server with Public IP you’d like to swap/move
• {src_node_id} - the exact ID of the node (from the stated environment) the required Public IP is attached to
• {dst_node_id} - ID of the target node (can belong to any environment at your account)

It will take a few minutes for all the necessary operations to be completed.

After that, you’ll be shown the details on current IPs of the stated nodes within the method output.

More info

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PHP 7 Support (4.3 / 4.4)

A new major version of PHP server-side scripting language, that takes almost two years for being developed and polished, have been finally released under the PHP 7 name. Being based on the refactored Zend Engine called PHPNG (PHP Next Generation), it shows a significant capacity boost compared to the legacy versions. This allows to increase your PHP applications' performance in up to 2 times just through upgrading the server’s engine version it is running on.

Also, the great emphasis was made on the language syntax enhancements - namely, removal of the previous versions' deprecated functionality and simultaneous improvement of language consistency. The detailed information on new features and backward incompatibility issues can be examined at the official Migrating from PHP 5.6.x to PHP 7.0.x document.

As for the specifics of PHP 7 integration at the platform, this resulted in the following changes of the supported modules' list for the nodes, running on this engine version:

• removed - mysql (deprecated, use mysqli instead)
• added - gearman, mongodb (to be used instead of mongo one)
• currently unavailable for PHP 7 (will be added upon being developed) - event, intl, mysqlnd_ms, mysqlnd_qc, ncurses, solr, solr2, xcache

At the platform dashboard, the newest version of PHP engine can be found alongside the preceding ones (namely - PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5 and 5.6) for being selected during the environment creation or while changing its topology.

The PaaS 4.4 release is delivered with the latest PHP 7.0.2 engine, which includes a number of security and bug fixes, whilst PaaS 4.3 provides the 7.0.0 PHP version. In addition, the next changes in the in-built PHP modules' list were implemented:

• provided support of the previously unavailable for PHP 7 extensions: gearman, intl, solr, solr2, oauth, gmp (for legacy PHP containers on the top of CentOS 5 distribution)
• with an aim to simplify the migration of the already existing applications to the newest engine version, the rebuilt and adjusted mysql module (excluded within the preceding 4.3 version) was appended
• several new extensions were added for all of the provided PHP versions, namely: pdo_dblib, pdo_oci, pdo_odbc, readline, recode, sysvmsg, enchant, odbc. See the details below.

More info

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MongoDB Driver for PHP Update

In order to work with the MongoDB database, PHP requires a special low-level driver, that was recently updated. Thus, in the present 4.3 PaaS release, the new mongodb.so module was added to the pool of extensions, provided for PHP app servers by default. Herewith, the deprecated driver (mongo.so) still remains available to ensure support of the already launched applications, built on its basis; however, we recommend to consider the latest driver version for your new projects, whilst taking into the consideration that both these modules implement different API, so the existing libraries, that use the legacy driver, should be rebuilt for working with the new one.

Just as before, in order to establish the connection between your PHP application server and MongoDB node, the appropriate module should be enabled beforehand. This can be performed directly within the dashboard by entering the app server Configs, uncommenting the required extension within the etc > php.ini file and restarting the node in order to apply new settings.

More info

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PHP Modules List Refactoring (4.3 / 4.4)

The platform provides the most popular and frequently used PHP modules out-of-box, i.e. they are included to the default PHP application servers' builds. Such embedded basis allows to launch most of the applications on fly, without any code changes required.

However, as the number of extensions is constantly growing, it was decided to shorten the list of active modules to the several most commonly used ones, while the rest of them became disabled by default (i.e. became “dynamic”). In such a way, the amount of consumed memory at a bare server reduces, being revealed from the unrequired services running, while any of the necessary modules still can be enabled manually in a few easy steps. As a result, all the newly created PHP app server containers will be launched cleaned up, with a lower level of default resource consumption and more flexible extensions' configurability.

• The list of modules, that were removed from the active ones and became dynamic, can be seen
  here.

  bz2.so calendar.so curl.so dba.so dom.so exif.so fileinfo.so ftp.so gettext.so gmp.so iconv.so inotify.so json.so mbstring.so mcrypt.so	mongodb.so mysqlnd_ms.so mysqlnd_qc.so mysqlnd.so oauth.so openssl.so pcntl.so pdo_firebird.so pdo_mysql.so pdo_pgsql.so pdo.so pdo_sqlite.so phar.so posix.so pspellso	rar.so shmop.so simplexml.so sqlite3.so svn.so sysvsem.so sysvshm.so tidy.so tokenizer.so wddx.so xmlreader.so xmlwriter.so zip.so zlib.so

The complete list of modules (both in-built and dynamic ones) is specified at the dedicated documentation page and within the introductory comments of the etc > php.ini configuration file. Further, at the same file, each dynamic extension has its own section, where it can be enabled (through simple uncommenting of the corresponding string) and configured if needed.

Physically, all modules are located at the dedicated modules server folder, where you can also upload your custom extensions and consequently activate them via the same php.ini file.

Within the 4.4 Platform release, a bunch of new modules were implemented for all of the provided PHP engines, namely: pdo_dblib.so, pdo_oci.so, pdo_odbc.so, readline.so, recode.so, sysvmsg.so, enchant.so and odbc.so.

Also, the ZendGuardLoader.so extension support was added for PHP 5, both of the provided 5.5 and 5.6 versions (previously, it was available for the 5.3 / 5.4 PHP engine only).

More info

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OpenSSL Update

OpenSSL is an open source toolkit, that implements Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) network protocols. The openssl command-line tool is pre-installed at all platform containers and can be used for handling various security-related operations, like public/private keys management, SSL/TLS client-server testing, etc.

Recently, the substantial security update has been implemented for all of the currently supported OpenSSL versions, intended to fix a number of revealed vulnerabilities. Due to this fact, the current platform release provides the throughout update of OpenSSL packages at all containers (including the already existing ones) to their latest versions, provided for CentOS (as it is used as a basic OS template for all platform containers):

• for centos 6 (i.e. for containers, created before 4.0 platform upgrade) - openssl-1.0.1e-42.el6.x86_64.rpm, openssl-devel-1.0.1e-42.el6.x86_64.rpm
• for centos 7 - openssl-1.0.1e-42.el7.9.x86_64.rpm, openssl-devel-1.0.1e-42.el7.9.x86_64.rpm, openssl-libs-1.0.1e-42.el7.9.x86_64.rpm

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Node.js Engine Update

Node.js is a popular open source cross-platform lightweight runtime, implemented on the top of the Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. At the platform, Node.js hosting is provided based on the cartridge packaging model and offers an easy way to build the highly performant, scalable network applications.

Commonly, the Node.js packages are dependent on OpenSSL (as it is linked to binaries during build process), which receives some security fixes recently. Thus, with an aim to prevent the possible malfunctions and vulnerabilities use, another Node.js patch-level update was released, which also includes some other security defects elimination (like threats of service denials and out-of-bounds access)

Striving to ensure the highest level of security for our users, the abovementioned patch was applied to all of the provided Node.js engine versions (namely: 0.10.41, 0.12.9, 4.2.3) within the platform upgrade to 4.3.

More info

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Software Stack Versions

The component templates versions have been updated to their latest versions since the previous release:

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Bug Fixes

In the table below, you can see the list of bug fixes in PaaS 4.3:

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