Release notes for version 23.1.x

New features#

Launchpad redesign and pipeline enhancements#

To enhance pipeline search and navigation capabilities, we now support a new list view to complement the existing card view. The list view allows users to efficiently search for and navigate to their pipeline of choice, while also ensuring that the most relevant information is visible and the relationships between pipelines are clear. With this new feature, users can access their pipelines in either card or list view, making them easier to manage.

We have also introduced a new pipeline detail view that shows in-depth information about each pipeline without needing to access the edit screen.

Enhanced support for Fusion file system#

Tower 23.1 introduces support for the Fusion file system in Google Cloud Batch environments. Fusion is a distributed, lightweight file system for cloud-native pipelines that has been shown to improve performance by up to ~2.2x compared to cloud native object storage.

With this new integration, Google Cloud Batch users can enjoy a faster, more efficient, and cheaper processing experience. Fusion offers many benefits, including faster real-time data processing, batch processing, and ETL operations, making it a valuable tool for managing complex data pipelines. By using Fusion with Google Cloud Batch, users can run their data integration workflows directly against data residing in Google Cloud Storage. This integration will allow Google users to streamline their data processing workflows, increase productivity, reduce cloud spending, and achieve better outcomes.

Wave WebSockets support#

We have added a new secure way to connect two elements, Tower and Wave, using WebSockets. This is an important addition for our enterprise customers as it ensures connection safety, improved efficiency, and better control over traffic sent between Tower and Wave. This connection will help facilitate the adoption of Fusion by enterprise customers, as it provides a more secure and reliable way to manage their data integration workflows. With WebSockets, users can easily connect their Tower and Wave instances and take advantage of the many benefits that Fusion has to offer.

Other enhancements#

• Save executed runs as pipelines
• Improved allruns list view and filtering
• Filter runs by label
• Admin panel enhancements: team and workspace management
• Additional dashboard enhancements:
  • Export dashboard data to CSV.
  • Improved date fiiltering
• Default resource labels for compute environments per workspace
• Fusion log download
• Upgrade Micronaut to 3.8.5
• Tower Agent connection sharing
• Customizable log format
• AWS Parameter store support (distributed config values)
• Azure Repos credential support
• Fusion v2 EBS disk optimized configuration

Breaking changes and warnings#

Breaking changes and instructions listed here apply when updating from Tower version 22.4. If you are updating from an earlier version, see the release notes of previous versions for a complete picture of changes that may affect you.

Updated AWS permissions policies#

Several new Tower features over the last few releases require updated AWS IAM permissions policies. Retrieve and apply the latest policy files here.

Wave requires container registry credentials#

The Wave containers service uses container registry credentials in Tower to authenticate to your (public or private) container registries. This is separate from your existing cloud provider credentials stored in Tower.

This means that, for example, AWS ECR (Elastic Container Registry) authentication requires an ECR container registry credential if you are running a compute environment with Wave enabled, even if your existing AWS credential in Tower has IAM access to your ECR.

See the relevant container registry credentials page for provider-specific instructions.

Nextflow launcher image#

If you must host your nf-launcher container image on a private image registry:

1. Copy the nf-launcher image to your private registry.

2. Update your tower.env with the launch container environment variable:

   TOWER_LAUNCH_CONTAINER=<FULL_PATH_TO_YOUR_PRIVATE_IMAGE>

Changelog#

For a detailed list of all changes, please consult the Nextflow Tower Changelog.

Sharing feedback#

Share your feedback via support.seqera.io.