Azure Industrial IoT Release 2.8.0

We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.8.0 of our Industrial IoT Platform as well as the declaration of Long-Term Support (LTS) for this version.
While we continue to develop and release updates to our ongoing projects on GitHub, we now also offer a branch that will only get critical bug fixes and security updates starting in July 2021. Customers can rely upon a longer-term support lifecycle for these LTS builds, providing stability and assurance for the planning on longer time horizons our customers require. The LTS branch offers customers a guarantee that they will benefit from any necessary security or critical bug fixes with minimal impact to their deployments and module interactions. At the same time, customers can access the latest updates in the master branch to keep pace with the latest developments and fastest cycle time for product updates.

IMPORTANT
We suggest to update from the version 2.6 or later to ensure secure operations of your deployment. 2.8.0 is not backwards compatible with version 2.5.

Version 2.8.0 includes an updated version of the IoT Edge Runtime, a new Linux base image for all Linux deployments, and several bug fixes. The detailed changes delivered in 2.8.0 are the following:

IoT Edge related changes

• IoT Edge update from 1.0.9.4 to 1.1 LTS
  This LTS alignment syncs the support stories for IoT Edge and the Azure Industrial Platform, bringing updated capabilities around device scope management.
• OPC stack logging and tracing for better OPC Publisher diagnostics
  In standalone mode the log level specified via command-line arguments now affects the tracing including the OPC UA stack used and provides additional diagnostics information.

Security related fixes

• Alpine images for Linux instead of Debian base images
  The base image for our deployment has been updated to Alpine. This change minimizes the deployment surface area, relevant for support and security considerations, and aligns with the IoT Edge workload container base images.
• Update Windows base images
  Updated Windows base images to latest version to fix security vulnerabilities.
• Update dependencies to latest/fix issues in dependencies as per CG
  We updated all NuGet dependencies to their latest LTS version to address CVE 2021-26701 and other vulnerabilities.

Bug fixes

• Deployment from branches other than release/and from forks is enabled
  Customers can now create their own branching model, including GitHub forks. The deployment script execution has been updated to facilitate support for non-standard branch names.
• Fix for error when deploying the IIoT solution via a deployment script
  Customers can deploy “latest” tag from main line and forks instead of just release branches. Mainline deployment does not fail anymore.
• CA-signed app certs for OPC Publisher are now enabled for standalone mode
  Non-self-signed certificates issued from standard CA are now enabled for the OPC Publisher in production.
• Fixed an issue with OPC Twin causing the first connection attempt to always fail on IoT Edge version 1.1
  The introduction of IoT Edge LTS backwards compatibility breaking change to only use device scope authentication by default introduced an issue for OPC Twin which required a second attempt to activate, which is now fixed.
• Fixed a standard compliance issue for certificate storage naming conventions
  The storage location for certificates in 2.8.0 is now compliant with the OPC UA standard naming convention.
• Introduced proper concurrency barriers #669
  This fixes issues concurrently accessing and updating subscription models inside the OPC Publisher.
• Fixed a rare race condition when publishing nodes.json file to a live IoT Edge with 2.7 on a Linux container
  This fixes an issue, where updating published nodes json file in a live IoT Edge hosting scenario caused issues in 2.7 on Linux where the trigger and read information from file are in a race condition.
• Added file system watcher for file delete operations
  When the published nodes file was deleted, the change was not properly picked up and could result in a crash/non-responsive OPC Publisher.
• Fixed an issue with session management when publishing nodes across groups and assets for the same endpoint
  Sessions are now not being closed and reopened when assets on the same session are updated.
• Fixed an issue with discovery service failing to recognize the local host address #743
  Fixed an exception thrown during discovery when local host cannot be resolved.
• Support flexible worker assignments and avoid NullReferenceException in case of job continuation
  Calling PATCH /registry/v2/publishers/{publisherId} with smaller number of MaxWorker will not result into terminating worker.
• Autofac.Core.DependencyResolutionException at /history/v2/read//values #1137
  Fixes a regression in functionality where several history service calls were not working and causing a crash.
• OPC UA namespace URI changes after parsing it
  Fixes an issue where the namespace uri was changed from its original default by adding a trailing / to the uri part of the node id.
• Failure when more than 486 values are added to the OPC Publisher #813
  Fixes a customer reported issue where the command line argument would update the wrong setting in the OPC Publisher core and causing failures in certain cases.
• Extend matching of subscriptions notification to published nodes
  Using DataSetFieldId as identifier for PubSub payload is not working if published node was defined by Expanded Node ID from published nodes json.
• Cancel the current job when no job is available
  When a job is deleted the OPC Publisher’s job processing operation is not properly stopped.

Deployment Instructions

For guidance on how to get started please follow our documentation or for more detailed instructions see our Industrial IoT Platform operations manual.

Bugs and Feedback

Please continue to leverage GitHub to notify the team of any issues you encounter, suggestions for the future, and any other comments you may have about this project.