Cloud Pak for Data v4.6 - Available now!

We are excited to announce that version 4.6 of Cloud Pak for Data is released as of November 30th! This is our second feature release in 2022, only 5 months after the release of 4.5. Cloud Pak for Data enables organizations to get the most out of their data - encompassing the capabilities of 40+ IBM and partner services that are continually expanding. 

Release Highlights

Base Service and Cartridge Updates 

• GA of Watson Pipelines service for Cloud Pak for Data
• Release of the new IBM Data Replication Cartridge
• Release of the new Watson Runtimes and AI Factsheets services as of v4.5.3

Compliance Updates

In order to keep providing its services to government customers and expand further into federal markets, Cloud Pak for Data has taken the effort to improve its CIS (Center of Internet Security) security compliance. CIS provides benchmark and guideline for set of vendor-agnostic, internationally recognized secure configuration guidelines for various platforms such as Operating systems, Cloud infrastructure, Servers software etc. CIS Kubernetes & OpenShift  hardening guidelines are quickly becoming industry standards for containerized workloads. A CIS hardened OpenShift provides minimal plane of attack and enables top class security and numerous restrictions on workloads. Cloud Pak for Data now is certified to be deploy on CIS hardened OpenShift.

Deployment Improvements 

4.6 introduces Day 0/1 operation improvements for both initial deployments and day to day operations, including Single Architecture (chipset) container images for air gapped deployments. Fat multi-arch images were bulky and not required in most cases. This will help reduce overall download and install time drastically. Furthermore, we’ve made various cpd-cli enhancements to ease deployment and configurations.

Monitoring Features

In our effort to simplify day 2 operations for Cloud Pak for Data admins, the product will introduce new "Alerts" features:

• Monitoring more discoverable for administrators
  • critical and warning alerts displayed on homepage
  • “Events and alerts” page redesigned to include an interactive bubble graph
  • New "Alert Forwarding" tab in the Configurations page allows administrators to set up email, SNMP, or Slack notifications to users and can be easily set up with notifications that are pushed to the admin.
• STIG Compliance updates - Admins now have the ability to check to identify suspicious access and take action immediately.
  • Ability to check the status of their users (online/offline) in Access Control page
  • Ability to check the timings and duration of a user’s current session or previous session with an option to evict and disable suspicious users. This update complies to one of the STIG compliance requirements to to identify suspicious access and take action immediately.

Pod Specification Overrides

Cloud Pak for Data now provides a mechanism to override certain aspects of Pod Definitions that was previously not possible due to Kubernetes Operator reconciliation. This works by leveraging admission controller to apply patches directly to pods that are associated with Kubernetes deployments, statefulsets, replicasets, replicacontrollers, jobs, and cronjobs. This will provide for certain use cases:

• add environment variables to pod containers (e.g. for HTTP Proxy)
• add labels to pods
• add annotations to pods
• add node affinity rules to isolate specific workloads
• customize resource requests and limits.

Get Started

Expert Labs Services
Ready to modernize? Need help accelerating Cloud Pak for Data implementation or upgrades? Connect with the Expert Labs team.

Dive Deeper
To learn more about the IBM Cloud Pak for Data 4.6 release:

• Read IBM Cloud Pak for Data Product Manager Sachin Prasad's blog
• Read the release notes
• Dive into the documentation
• Read more about IBM Data Replication on Cloud Pak for Data

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