Ooyala Flex Media Platform 2020.5.0 Release Notes

Ooyala is excited to present the May 2020 release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform, 2020.5.0.

This release of Ooyala Flex Media Platform provides the new features, quality and security enhancements, bug fixes, and other changes listed below.

Flex 2020.5 is an interim release track, allowing customers to make use of the latest functionality and bug fixes in Flex before the next LTS (Long Term Supported) release track becomes available.

As an interim release track, it should be noted that this release:

  • will only receive security updates once the next track (2020.6) is available.
  • will no longer receive any updates once the next LTS track (2020.6) is available.

Job Concurrency Management

Before 2020.5.0, the number of jobs executed concurrently was applied across all the accounts and for all the job types. This is not adequate when multiple tenants are hosted by a single Flex instance or if there is a need to control the number of concurrent executions of a given action to manage resource utilisation or to achieve balanced job throughput.

The support to limit job concurrency allows Flex to manage concurrency at the three levels:

  • Account Job Concurrency Limit: This defines the maximum number of jobs of any type that can be executed concurrently in an account. This limit can only be configured by master account administrators.
  • Action Type Concurrency Limit: This defines the maximum number of jobs of a given action type that can be executed concurrently in an account. This limit can be configured by account administrators by creating a quota of type Limit Concurrent Jobs by Action Type and assigning the quota to the account or sub-account.
  • Action Config Concurrency Limit: This defines the maximum number of jobs of a specific action configuration that can be executed concurrently at any given point. This limit can be configured on action details page of an action.

User Group Assignment via Identity Providers

It is now possible to manage user group memberships through SAML Identity Providers (IdP). Users logging into a Flex account via a SAML IdP will be assigned user groups defined in Flex that match the name of user groups defined and managed by the IdP.

Groups must be manually created in Flex with the required role and each given a name that matches a group defined in the Identity Provider in advance of the users logging-in. If the matching group does not exist in Flex, the user will not be assigned to any group on login and will assume the default role set on the account. Changes to user group assignments on the IdP will be reflected in Flex the next time the user logs into Flex.

SAML Support for Master Account Users

The Master Account now supports Account Metadata. This allows the Master Account to receive configuration properties that enable account features such as password complexity and SAML configuration so that Master Account users can also access the account via a SAML IdP.

Account Configuration Enhancements

Flex accounts can now be administered directly by admin users of the account. Previously only users of the Master Account were able to set account configuration such as SAML IdP configuration therefore limiting the ability of account administrators to manage their own account in a significant way.

Starting with Flex 2020.05, users of the Master Account will be able to set up account quotas against a Flex account with the remainder of the account configuration delegated to users of the account with an administrator role.

New JW Player Publish Plug-In features

Further to the functionality provided by the JW Player Publish plug-in introduced in Flex 2020.4.0, this release extends the existing capabilities by enabling republishing of assets, and support for publishing assets stored in Azure and Google Cloud storage.

Object Storage Server-Side Encryption using CMK

S3 based storage resources can now be configured with a Customer Managed Key identifier to enable server-side encryption (SSE) of data at rests using a key that has be configure in the AWS Key Management Service (KMS). When the storage resource CMK ID is provided, all objects written into the bucket shall be encrypted using the key identified by the CMK ID parameter. If SSE needs to be strictly enforced on the bucket then the appropriate policy must be set on the bucket to ensure that non-encrypted write requests fail. Please go to [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingKMSEncryption.html] for more information.

Breaking Change Notice

With the introduction of multiple CDN support to the Publish Indexer service, the Publish V2 actions (Asset Publish Action V2, Publish User Defined Object Action) have been changed in a breaking manner that is not backwards compatible. Check whether any of these actions exist in the environment, by running the following using flexctl version >= 0.22.0:

flexctl get actions --plugin-uuids ccd71e16-5b8c-4d80-9864-cecd9f6a4b3a,11fdd37c-cc1a-4883-8e0b-fe0a0e9fa869

If there are any active actions defined, please contact the Dalet Ooyala development team who will be able to advise on how to update the relevant configuration.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue identified in the previous Flex 2020.4.0 release whereby publishing to Facebook failed after upgrading.
  • Resolved an issue whereby workspaces were checked as part of the Access Control List (ACL) implementation unnecessarily, this resulted in permission issues when launching workflows against sequences in the OoyalaMAM application.
  • Resolved an issue whereby the Purge action failed to purge assets that contained MPEG metadata.
  • Resolved a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) token issue which resulted in a “Security Violation” error when editing metadata.
  • Resolved a Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) token issue whereby the token was not passed, blocking visibility of backing stores within the metadata.
  • Improved the output and handling of Exception errors generated when Flex Enterprise converts string values to XML. The exception message now includes the string it is trying to convert.
  • Resolved an issue with Jobs not being launched by an event handler despite the event handler running correctly.
  • Aligned the Metadata Definition API call usage with that experienced through the application user interface so that the definition no longer needs to be disabled first to update its name and description.
  • Resolves a system error in the Enterprise application User Interface when viewing the File tab of an Asset as a result of the UI attempting to convert the asset frame rate even when this had not been detected.
  • Resolved an issue whereby Publish failed for segmented assets stored in Google Cloud Storage (GCS).
  • Updated the Media Core library to allow timecode values up to 99-hours, as some customers had encountered job failures for assets, when the timecode was limited to 24-hours.
  • Introduced support for multiple Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) within the Flex Publish Indexer Service, to enable the publish of assets and UDOs to multiple CDN destinations. A new “CDN Resource” resource type has been introduced within Flex Enterprise.
  • Introduced a run-rule which updates the Storage Resource configuration fields in Flex Enterprise, to only show those required and relevant to the protocol selected.

Known Issues

  • The Twitter Publish Plugin is not working. A new JEF Twitter Publish Plugin will be introduced in the next Flex 2020.6.0 release.
  • If Flex Reviewer is being used, the flex-publishindexer-service must now be deployed (as this service is now responsible for generating the publish token).

Please contact your Dalet Ooyala representative for the full upgrade notes, further information about this release, and the complete list of resolved issues.