New Features in MMCloud Fire Island 2.3.3 Release

Date Released

Fire Island 2.3.3 released on 10-16-2023.

MMCloud is designed to work on any cloud infrastructure. The Fire Island 2.3.3 release supports the following clouds:

Every batch job submitted to OpCenter must specify a data volume if the job requires any file system I/O. In 2.3.3, JuiceFS, a high-performance, open-source, distributed file system, is added as an option when specifying a data volume for a job.
The MMCloud CLI has a command to add users to the OpCenter's built-in authentication database. In earlier releases, the new user's user id (uid) is generated automatically. In 2.3.3, the option to specify the uid is added.
In earlier releases, a user's uid is cannot be changed once the account is added. In 2.3.3, the uid can be changed after the account is added.
OpCenter provides Job Templates to simplify the procedures for starting specialized servers, for example, servers providing RStudio or Jupyter sessions. A template to start a Nextflow host is now available. After the Nextflow host is running, you can ssh into the server and submit a Netxtflow pipeline in the usual way.
Access to some services, for example, AWS S3, requires an [access_key, secret_key] pair. In earlier releases, the [access_key, secret_key] pair is included as plaintext in float commands. To improve security, 2.3.3 includes a secret key manager, that is, an encrypted store of [access_key, secret_key] pairs managed by the OpCenter. CLI commands can now include an [access_key, secret_key] pair by referring to the secret manager, rather than displaying the plaintext.

## Bug Fixes

Fixed condition where job state shows "Executing" even though checkpoint failed.
In earlier releases, setting the VM creation policy to onDemand=true disabled further attempts if the initial attempt at starting an on-demand instance failed. In 2.3.3, the retry policy for on-demand instances is similar to the policy for spot instances.