Arvados 2.0.0 Release Notes

February 14, 2020

The Arvados team is pleased to announce Arvados v2.0.0. This is a major upgrade, with many new features. Some older components have also been deprecated or removed, superceded by newer components or APIs. Please also review the upgrade notes.

A complete list of issues resolved in this release can be found on the developer site.

User

New Workbench

This release introduces an entirely new Arvados Workbench, called “Workbench 2”, built using modern web technologies and based on user feedback. It features:

Enhanced accessibility for the most important features
Better responsiveness, loading only data needed for display
Advanced tagging and searching of data collections with user-supplied metadata

The traditional Workbench also remains available.

Support for CWL 1.1

The Arvados workflow runner supports the latest Common Workflow Language standard. CWL 1.1 adds optional secondary files on inputs, and standardizes options to control work reuse, enable network access, and load directory listing contents.

Improved keyword search

Keyword search now reliably returns expected results when searching for parts of filenames.

Admin

New unified configuration file

Configuration has been reorganized into a single unified configuration file at /etc/arvados/config.yml which is read by all components. This streamlines installation and maintenance, and reduces opportunities for error by eliminating redundancy.

New Cloud Dispatcher

The arvados-dispatch-cloud service manages the full lifecycle of VM creation, container scheduling, and idle VM destruction for elastic cloud computing. It replaces the previous approach of managing an elastic SLURM cluster with Arvados Node Manager and crunch-dispatch-slurm. SLURM is still supported for on-premise HPC environments.

Install and Admin documentation overhaul

The installation and admin documentation have been substantially updated and rewritten to be easier to follow and fill in gaps.

Centralized user management option

An organization with multiple Arvados clusters can now centralize user management by designating one cluster to be the “LoginCluster” which owns the user accounts for the federation. This enables users to log in to any cluster in the federation with consistent identity, credentials, and permissions.

Transfer ownership of user objects

An admin can now transfer ownership of all objects and permissions from one user to another, for example to transition the work of a user who is leaving the organization to another user.

Identify users by upstream email address

During login, users in Arvados are now looked up based on email addresses supplied by the upstream login provider. This avoids the need to migrate user accounts in order to switch from one login method to another. Users can change email addresses provided the old email address is retained as an alias.

The arvados-controller component now directly supports Google login (as an alternative to redirecting to the SSO server). If you only require Google login, you can now configure it in config.yml and decommission the Arvados SSO server.

Managed Properties

The admin can configure rules (“protected” and “original owner”) that apply to specific user-defined properties on collections.

Support for Debian 10

Arvados now supports Debian 10 (“buster”).

Deprecated

Crunch v1 (jobs/pipelines API)

The legacy crunch v1 (“jobs”) infrastructure for running pipelines has been removed. A read-only API remains to provide access to legacy database records for installations that have them. Arvados installations performed since the end of 2017 (v1.1.0) should only have ever used the crunch v2 (“containers”) API, and are unaffected by this change.

Node manager

Although not removed from this release, the functionality of Arvados Node Manager is superseded by the new arvados-dispatch-cloud service.

Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian 8

Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian 8 are no longer supported.