VerneMQ 1.8.0 release highlights

Here's a quick overview on some of the highlights in VerneMQ Release 1.8. This is a minor release which means (as a reminder to folks outside of software development) that there are bug fixes and new features, but no breaking changes.

Improvements and Bugfixes

A couple of bugs have been found and fixed as you can see in the changelog 1.8.0 Release information. This is probably expected and not too interesting (as long as we fix the bugs... ;) We also have included a lot of small improvements. One of those is the completion of MQTT 5.0 support for the WebHooks and Lua plugin system. We've also added checking for TLS cert files when starting VerneMQ to address silent file permission errors. We also now support TLS encrypted connections for MongoDB and PostgreSQL auth databases (when using vmq_diversity). We've been addressing some performance issues with shared subscribers too. And there's some more stuff like that. Not really new features but improvements on existing ones. We also cleaned up the SWC metadata layer that we introduced with release 1.7.

New features

A couple of new features made it into 1.8:

First, we added a couple of new metrics that allow us to show you a "routing score" for every cluster node on the VerneMQ cluster status page. The routing score consists of two percentages similar to 75 / 25 indicating that 75% of the received MQTT publish frames were routed to local subscribers and 25% were forwarded to subscribers on different cluster nodes. The routing score can be used to detect imbalances in a VerneMQ cluster and optimize your traffic and client partition.

Second, there's support for CockroadDB as an auth database. (jep, it's not just the PostgreSQL script).

The third and forth new feature can probably be considered internal:

We implemented the vqm_pulse plugin to help customers who can't give us direct access to their VerneMQ clusters. If vmq_pulse is switched on, the cluster will push metrics to us. We'll analyze them in realtime or pre-emptively and you'll benefit from our operational insights. And before you ask, no, there is no Pulse metrics standard or anything. It's invented and developed by us! :)

We've also switched to FPM for building our Linux release packages. We're only mentioning this here because we're interested to hear from you if you experience install/permission/setup issues with the packages.

Marked for deprecation

We've marked the allow_multiple_sessions feature for deprecation in 2.0. It proved to be causing instabilities in some cases and it wasn't of much use anyway. Do not confuse this with the shared subscription feature (which is fine and dandy to use). Some users like the feature exclusively for one of its side effects: faster client registration. To still allow this in the future you now have the coordinated_registrations config option in the vernemq.conf. Again, let us know whether this deprecation will affect you.

Thanks to our customers and the community for giving us precious feedback, opening issues and contributing pull requests!

The VerneMQ Team