The Tanzu Application Catalog team continues improving application release navigation and visibility with this update. These latest changes provide more information on why new versions of your applications are being released into your registries and a real-time window into our content building pipelines. Read on to learn for more detail about these improvements.

A real time view into application release creation

The experience for navigating through the different releases of your applications in Tanzu Application Catalog (TAC) was limited and mostly focused on browsing the latest release of any application. When anything was being built, the old TAC UI would show a “Release Pending” message that did not provide actionable or useful information, and kept users from accessing the existing release or release history. This was particularly frustrating when there were any issues with our content creation, not to mention the application often stayed in a state of limbo for hours or even days for complex new releases. The recent TAC update changes all this! 

Now, when clicking on any of an applications from the home catalog users will be taken to a new application release pipelines screen with a view of the complete application release history, as well as a sneak peak on any release version that might be actively being built in real time. 

If a release is being tricky and fails, you now still have access to any of the past releases information. If any new releases are being built, you will find those here with an in progress state. Users also now have access to the complete history, making it easier to navigate through those releases. We’ve also included access to detailed information like what triggered the release and when the release was worked on. 

Enhanced triggering information

A complete view on why and when content was built improves transparency even. On the new release pipelines you will be able to browse what triggered every new build by just hovering over the respective trigger reasons.

There are several reasons for triggering new application releases. At the time of writing this blog post you will find:

• Upstream changes: The upstream OSS provider has done a new release. We usually pick those in a few hours.
  
• Packaging changes: Those are updates that we do in our container images or Helm charts. This includes improvements in Dockerfiles or Helm templates, new features, bug fixes, etc.
  
• CVE fixes: Your application is being built due to some important CVE (usually HIGH or CRITICAL) that we have detected and that can be fixed by bumping dependencies.
  
• OS dependencies: When there are important dependencies updated at the operating system level, we always try to bump those promptly both to address vulnerabilities and to keep your base OS up-to-date.
  
• Maintenance releases: Sometimes we might need to push releases manually. Often whole catalogs. This can happen when we update internal systems and we need to update provenance files, or when we add new downloadable artifacts, when we need to retrigger builds to handle particularly tricky CVEs, and some other reasons. We expect to enhance this trigger with more contextual information soon so that you have a better understanding on why every release gets built.
  

All this triggering information as well as all the data about the release pipelines is also available via TAC’s official REST API, allowing users to consume it programmatically. 

Application Release Pipeline

Finally, the application release screen now shows a complete pipeline that gives details on why everything was built, details the different steps and how long it took to release the application into your registry. If there are failures, those show up also within the pipeline details and will help you to reach out to our customer support team for assistance. 

This information is in real-time, so if anything is being actively built you will notice it from the pipeline screen itself:

Keep an eye out for more updates

We are excited to deliver all these changes and aim to increase transparency and trust in the content that we provide to all our customers. We would love to know your thoughts and your feedback. So, please reach out to us, we will be more than happy to learn more about your ideas in this area. 

For more information about the Tanzu Application Catalog, visit our webpage. To keep up with the latest on our minimal container images initiative and more, be sure to follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and Linkedin.