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Changelog

  • 3 min read

Release 3.5

Kelvin SDK

  • New Emulation System & Emulation configuration based on the app.yaml. The system configuration now applies to emulated applications.
  • Support for the new simplified app configuration as well as the new MQTT implementation.

Kelvin Connect

One of the most significant features of this release is the launch of Kelvin Connect v1.0 for OPC-UA protocol. Kelvin Connect is a part of our broader edge computing product strategy (Kelvin Edge) and is designed to make connection to machines and data sources like historians, PLCs, etc. in a manufacturing facility a breeze with a wizard based UI.

With Kelvin Connect, users can now easily create a bridge between OT data sources and the KICS software, map the OPC tags and metrics, and easily decide to bring the most relevant data into the KICS platform to do machine learning and / or to run applications.

In the current release, Kelvin Connect offers OPC-UA connectivity. Our intent is to extend the capabilities of Kelvin Connect in subsequent releases to offer additional OT + IT data integration capabilities as well.

Asset Model

An equally significant and long awaited development that we are introducing in this release is the introduction of 'Assets' and 'Asset Model' in our platform. Until now customer's machines / assets were identified in KICS software in correlation with the Node (gateways) which is not the right representation of assets, especially as our customers are scaling and there are scenarios where more than one asset could be connected to a Node.

In this release, we are introducing the 'Asset' representation and modeling capabilities. We are decoupling 'Assets' from 'ACPs' and renaming ACP to a more market and customer friendly term 'Node'.

The asset model definition in the platform will now allow us to bring new use cases in the following releases like asset representation in a hierarchy (July release), Asset health monitoring (August release), etc. The 'Nodes' on the other hand will represent the IT workloads and information (bridges, connections, other workloads running on the gateway and their health). Together this Asset + Node view will offer our customers complete operational intelligence about their facility and infrastructure -- something which is going to be a key differentiator of our software.

Move to MQTT in Kelvin Core

One of the bedrocks of the KICS platform has been it's modularity and flexibility to run and manage multiple workloads across various 'Nodes'. As 3rd party workloads and services are becoming more and more modular, we want to create a framework that will allow our customers, partners and acceleration teams to easily extend and plug'n'play additional software and services on the platform without the need for code change or engineering intervention.

With that in mind, we are making a significant move away from OPC-UA as the 'transport' mechanism between workloads in Kelvin Core at the edge to a more user and ecosystem friendly pub-sub mechanism based on MQTT.

With this change, it's now easy for customers and partners to bring their own workloads and 'subscribe' to the MQTT queue in Kelvin Core. These workloads could be packaged applications, data science models, other services (ex: Object DB, custom system integration, etc.).\

  • 1 min read

Release 3.2

Kelvin Control Center

  • Improve Control Center experience by enabling auto polling on lists to avoid unnecessary page refreshes

APIs

  • Improve efficiency and speed on Flow-based application builds in the backend

Upgrade to KICS 3.2.0

For users who have developed Kelvin Applications with older version than KICS 3.1.1, here are the steps to upgrade to KICS 3.1.1.

  1. Upgrade current running Platform Server Instance to KICS 3.2.0.
  2. Upgrade your local Kelvin SDK to KICS 3.2.0.\
  • 1 min read

Release 3.1.1

Kelvin SDK

  • Bulk Deployment - There's new command kelvin workload deploy-bulk to facilitate the deployment at scale.
  • Bundle Operations - The SDK now allows managing the bundles inside the application, run kelvin app bundle --help for more information.
  • SDK information - You can now run the command the kelvin --info to display system information for debug purposes.

Kelvin Data viewer

  • Data Labeling Cloud Server now supports Data Labeling directly from the UI. You can add, update and remove data labels from you data in the chart view. The feature is also supported in our REST API.
  • Data Export You can now export the data directly from the Chart view by selecting the metrics you want and press the download button. You will get a CSV with all the data presented in the Chart for the select time window.

Kelvin Control Center

The dashboard manager that oversees the platform.

Upgrade to 3.1.1

For users who have developed Kelvin Applications with older version than KICS 3.1.1, here are the steps to upgrade to KICS 3.1.1.

  1. Upgrade current running Platform Server Instance to KICS 3.1.1.
  2. Upgrade your local Kelvin SDK to KICS 3.1.1.
  • 3 min read

Release 3.0

KICS 3.0.0 is the first Platform release with all components associated with one KICS software version. This release simplifies user experience on KICS (e.g., building app configuration file with Kelvin Studio, deploying non-Kelvin docker container) and ensures Kelvin provides the best support for our customers. Any user who has Kelvin Application developed on KICS before this release will be required to migrate their application to be compatible with KICS 3.0.0. Also, there is a list of new features available in this release detailed below.

Applications

In this release, we have added support for two new types of applications on KICS Platform.

  • Docker - Dockerized application is a new type of application that is supported on KICS Platform. Users can bring their own docker container to the platform. KICS Platform will deploy and run the docker container the same as other Kelvin applications.
  • Bundle - Bundle is another new type of application supported on KICS Platform. Users can package more than one Kelvin application into a Kelvin bundle application to reduce the container overhead required for each application and optimize the communication between applications within the same bundle. Bundle application will be seen as one application workload running on Nodes. See details at Kelvin Application Bundle.

Kelvin SDK

In this release, Platform had added a layer of security to provide secret management for applications. Users can manage secrets for their applications using Kelvin SDK command line interface.

Kelvin Studio

Kelvin app configuration file (app.yaml) is one file that contains all the information KICS needs to build and run an application. Kelvin Studio is the graphical user interface on KICS to build and update Kelvin app configuration file.

Kelvin Core

Kelvin core is the App engine for all Kelvin Applications. In this release, built-in refinery (Data Refinement Modules) and gatekeeper (Operational Constraint Modules) functions are available to users through application configuration. Here are the list of new modules.

  • Refinery Modules
  • Compose -- See details at [Compose Tutorial (removed)]
  • Scale -- See details at [Scale Tutorial (removed)]
  • Timestamp Alignment -- See details at [Timestamp Alignment Tutorial (removed)]
  • Gatekeeper Modules
  • Min Max -- See details at [Min Max Tutorial (removed)]
  • Rate Limiter

Data Viewer

Data Viewer is the data visualization tool on KICS Platform. Users can visualize their data collected using Data Viewer based on a Node (i.e., data collected from same Node will automatically be displayed on the same data viewer page). In addition, a view template can be configured and customized to display a set of data within the Data Viewer.

APIs

All Kelvin APIs are documented here. Here is the list of new groups of APIs in KICS 3.0.0.

  • Data Labels APIs -- Provide users API access to label data on KICS platform in Time-series database.
  • View APIs -- Provide users API access to create view template that can drive custom views in Data Viewer.
  • Node Metrics APIs -- There are a new set of APIs to enable users to configure metrics for Node (e.g. memory, CPU usage, etc)
  • Secrets APIs -- Provide users API access to create, list and delete Secrets.

AWS / Azure / On-Prem Deployment

In this release, KICS platform supports installation options on AWS, Azure and On-Prem. Reach out to Kelvin Support for additional Installation Options.

Upgrade to KICS 3.0.0

For users who have developed Kelvin Applications with older version than KICS 3.0.0, here are the steps to upgrade to KICS 3.0.0.

  1. Upgrade current running Platform Server Instance to KICS 3.0.0.
  2. Upgrade your local Kelvin SDK to KICS 3.0.0.
  3. Migrate your existing application to be compatible with KICS 3.0.0. See details at Application Migration.