Sidra Data Platform (version 2025.02: Amazing Aviles)¶

Released on February 7, 2025

Refinements and Foundations for Future Enhancements

This month's release is a service-focused update, bringing important refinements to Sidra’s upgradeability, cost control, and deployment processes. While this release does not introduce major new features, it lays the groundwork for smoother service installations, more flexible infrastructure management, and increased efficiency for our users.

Key highlights in this release include:

A new Services Installer mechanism, reducing deployment complexity and improving upgrade reliability.
The ability to optionally deploy AI Search in DSUs, allowing organizations to optimize resource usage and costs.
Enhancements to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), increasing Sidra’s resilience against external changes in cloud environments and setting the stage for a more granular update model in the future.

In addition, we have resolved issues related to Anomaly Detection, authentication token renewal, and more, ensuring a more stable and predictable experience for Sidra users.

Read on for the full details of this release.

What's new in Sidra 2025.02¶

Improved Services Installer¶

With this release, we are introducing a new installation mechanism designed to enhance the stability, flexibility, and maintainability of Sidra's services. The Improved Services Installer isolates installation and upgrade processes into a dedicated installer container, preventing version conflicts between different service packages.

This new approach enables Sidra to execute pre-deployment and post-deployment tasks in a controlled environment, reducing the risk of dependency issues and ensuring a smoother service deployment and upgrade experience. The Supervisor will automatically determine whether a service should be installed using the new or legacy method, ensuring a seamless transition.

For this release, Supervisor and Core have been updated to use this new installation method, with future releases extending the same approach to all Sidra services. This marks an important step in making Sidra easier to upgrade, more resilient, and future-proof.

Optional AI Search Deployment for DSUs¶

As part of our ongoing efforts to give users more control over their infrastructure and costs, we are introducing an optional deployment setting for AI Search in Data Storage Units (DSUs).

With this release, administrators can choose whether to deploy AI Search when provisioning a new DSU, allowing organizations that do not require multi-modal search capabilities to reduce resource consumption and associated costs. If AI Search is not deployed, its corresponding private endpoint is also omitted, ensuring a leaner deployment.

Additionally, this release introduces a new capabilities framework, which allows Sidra to track and manage the features enabled in each DSU. This lays the groundwork for further customization and fine-grained cost control, ensuring that each DSU is strictly provisioned with the components that it needs.

This update is particularly beneficial for users who prioritize cost efficiency and do not require AI-powered search functionality in their data infrastructure.

Improvements to Infrastructure-as-Code¶

As part of this release, we have introduced enhancements to our Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) upgrade process, addressing challenges encountered in real-world deployments. During a recent upgrade, we identified issues caused by unsupported changes in ownership of Azure resources, which led to deployment failures when applying infrastructure updates. To improve stability and resilience, we have adjusted our upgrade mechanisms to better handle such scenarios.

Looking ahead, we are working on a new, more flexible upgrade model based on two clearly differentiated update scenarios:

Full Upgrades: Covering both infrastructure and code changes when necessary.
Code-Only Updates: A streamlined upgrade path for most releases, reducing deployment complexity by applying updates only to the platform code without modifying infrastructure components.

While this new approach is still in development, it represents a major step toward a smoother, more efficient upgrade experience, minimizing disruption and ensuring faster, more reliable updates for Sidra users.

Issues Resolved in Sidra 2025.02¶

These are the issues resolved during this release in Sidra:

Fixed an issue where Anomaly Detection did not work properly when assets lacked information about the number of records or bytes loaded. #8360
Fixed an issue where Microfrontends (Balea and Data Quality) did not automatically renew the token upon expiration. #8551

Coming soon¶

For the next release, Sidra will finally introduce a long-awaited new connector, expanding our integration capabilities even more. We will also bring new functionalities for reloading specific entities in Data Intake Processes (DIPs), giving users more flexibility and control over data management.

Additionally, we will continue our progress toward the new Data Product deployment mode that eliminates unnecessary cloud infrastructure changes, making deployments faster and more efficient. Alongside this, we are planning a significant version upgrade for key Sidra dependencies, ensuring improved performance, security, and long-term maintainability—plus the usual stability fixes and refinements.

We Want Your Feedback¶

Your ideas make Sidra better. For suggestions, issues, or questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].