Development Update - August 2021

Hello everyone! The following is our EaaSI development update for August 2021, from @klaus.rechert:


Greetings from the dev team in Freiburg. To make the EaaSI software development a bit more transparent we will post updates about ongoing tasks and upcoming features here at least once a month.

New storage backend with ACL enforcement

Until now the EaaSI server relied on a disk/file-system backed storage backend to store and manage disk images and to some degree user-objects. Rights management and access restrictions were rudimentary. This simple storage solution was not able to cope with growing installations and a growing user-base.

The new (unified) storage backend is based on S3 Object Storage technology and will remove some limitations of the local file storage model. By default the S3 storage can be configured either as gateway to a private/public external S3 provider or a local minio instance (provided and configured by the EaaSI installer) is used.

With the new storage backend a generic access control list (ACL) implementation has been added to allow fine grained control

UI Improvements

Many UI bugs have been addressed by our partner Dual Labs. The hosted EaaSI service is updated frequently, so improvements should be available on an ongoing basis.

In the next release of the platform, XPRA video and WebRTC audio support for Environments will now be defaults. This should greatly improve performance of both audio and video streams resulting in higher quality audio and less choppy video experiences for users.

Next steps

  • ACL and user management integration into the new user interface.
  • Improved workflows to use imported disk images, setup of custom emulated machines.
  • New release of the local installer.