Kpow v88.4 brings nice new UI features including resizable columns and easy JSON export of tabular data. The results of a recent security audit bring improved websocket security and user session management configuration. Finally, we have reduced the local topic disk usage and CPU consumption.
This release blog provides details of both the 88.3 and 88.4 releases.
Table UI Improvements
Sometimes it's the little things.
Two often requested features of Kpow are the ability to download tabular information easily and to be able to resize columns for easy access to data.
Security Improvements
A recent security audit provided valuable feedback, with some minor improvements incorporated into Kpow v88.4.
Websocket Same-Origin Protection
The Kpow UI makes use of websockets and when a user session starts a websocket connection upgrade occurs in your browser.
It is now possible to restrict the websocket upgrade request with a same-origin policy.
To apply same-origin header checking to the websocket upgrade request configure the user-facing scheme, host, and (optional) port of the Kpow instance like so:
WS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS=https://kpow.mycorp:3000
Kpow websockets are also protected by CSRF tokens, same-origin checking is an optional extra setting. The default allowed origins are '*', in part because Kpow is often deployed in a manner that it is impossible for Kpow to determine the user-facing host of its own instance.
Concurrent User Login Controls
Kpow v88.4 introduces the ability to optionally detect and block concurrent logins to the same user account.
ALLOW_CONCURRENT_LOGIN=false
Concurrent sessions are allowed by default.
User Session Max Age
Kpow v88.4 provides a new configuration parameter to control the maximum user session age.
SESSION_MAX_AGE=-1
The default max age is -1, which means no expiry. You may manage this session age via the identity provide integrated with Kpow (e.g. Okta, etc). However if you are using Kpow with LDAP this new parameter allows you to evict session after a set period in seconds.
Performance Improvements
We continuously monitor, stress, and record metrics about Kpow's performance in multi-cluster, multi-connect, multi-schema environment.
Recent observations let us to performance improvements that reduce Kpow local topic disk usage by 75% and CPU usage by 50%.
Confluent Cloud Disk Usage
We recently detected that our internal topics were not being compressed in Confluent Cloud due to limitations on configuration that we rely on as default.
Kpow 88.4 brings performance improvements that drop disk usage in a Confluent Cloud environment by 95%.