Introduction
We’re excited to announce that the next major release of the CHT is being worked on right now! As we follow Semantic Versioning (SemVer) and the release includes breaking changes, this will be CHT version 5.0.0. You can see every issue currently scheduled for 5.0.0, but we wanted to make an early announcement so that the community can follow along, prepare for upgrades and ask any questions.
The two primary breaking changes that 5.0.0 includes are:
- Reduce disk space with CouchDB Nouveau
- Hide the upgrade button in the admin app for k8s deployments
Let’s dive into what each of these does and why it’s a breaking change.
Reduce disk space with CouchDB Nouveau
For some time now, the Hosting Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) squad has been focusing on reducing TCO by decreasing the total amount of disk space the CHT takes. Early testing shows this feature is capable of reducing total disk savings by up to 30% in larger deployments. More details will be shared about this technical improvement as we approach its release.
The feature requires a new service to run alongside CouchDB, called Nouveau. Deployments using Docker can use in-app upgrades seamlessly. However, Kubernetes-based deployments will have to update their helm charts and redeploy. The fact that a new service is being deployed and that Kubernetes users cannot use the in-app upgrade process makes it a breaking change.
We will publish explicit, step-by-step documentation to make upgrades straightforward for Kubernetes users. Early adopters are welcome to check out the ticket or ask questions below for information about how to deploy alpha versions of this code. It is feature complete and ready for testing!
Hide the upgrade button in the admin app for k8s deployments
One issue that we’ve seen large Kubernetes deployments suffer from is that the in-app upgrade process is used and then, at a later date, the helm chart gets accidentally re-run against production. This causes the data in the CHT to be on a newer version than the CHT software that is running. To avoid this, we will remove the in-app ability to upgrade in Kubernetes deployments. After this change, Kubernetes upgrades will need to first stage the upgrade in the admin app, wait for the view indexing to finish and finally upgrade via helm charts.
As this improvement removes a feature from the CHT, it is considered a breaking change.
5.0.0 Schedule
The timeline for releasing 5.0.0 is before the end of 2025, possibly as soon as early in Q3. The milestone is still being worked on, and any contribution or support is most welcome.
Meanwhile, two new significant features (SSO and Task Prioritization) will be released before 5.0.0, in a 4.x release, so stay tuned!