Published Release Notes

Upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x requires downtime during upgrades to Pega Infinity 8.6

Upgrade impact statement

On-premises upgrades of Pega Infinity release 8.4.2 and later to version 8.5.1 or later on Tomcat and PostgreSQL are completed with near-zero downtime. However, upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x requires that you shut down and restart your application server.

What is required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

Hazelcast 3.x is enabled by default. For near-zero downtime upgrades, you do not need to perform any action.

For instructions about upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x, see one of the following topics:

• For near-zero downtime upgrades from Pega Infinity release 8.4.2 or later on Tomcat and PostgreSQL, see "Optional: upgrading to Pega Platform version 8.6: Upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x" in Near-zero downtime Upgrade Guide for Pega Platform version 8.4.2 and later for Tomcat and PostgreSQL.
• For all other upgrades, see "Optional: upgrading to Hazelcast 4.x" in the appropriate upgrade guide.

Enhanced support for the Kibana platform

Pega Cloud Services began running Kibana 4.6.x. In addition to this version update, the Kibana viewer now includes:

• “DEBUG” level messages in PegaRULES log
• The PegaRULES-SecurityEvent log

Pega Cloud Services support for the AWS EU (Paris) region

Pega Cloud Services now supports deployment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) EU (Paris) region. Deployment across multiple availability zones within a geographical region protects against zone faults and localized service disruptions, and ensures high availability.

For more information about regions and availability zones, see Pega Cloud availability and resiliency.

This additional region is available as of QI 2019.

Case archiving enhancements in Pega Cloud Services

To provide a more complete archiving solution to Pega Cloud clients, we have introduced several enhancements to the archival functionality for your Pega Platform database. This includes support for your data retention policy to expunge (permanently delete) archived data from Pega Cloud File Storage.

Permanently delete case data with data retention policy

In previous versions, Pega Cloud clients could archive resolved cases and associated data from the Pega database to Pega Cloud File Storage after the cases have been resolved for a specified number of days with an archival policy. Now, clients can permanently delete archived data from Pega Cloud File Storage after the cases have been resolved for a specified number of days with a data retention policy. 

Faster adoption with testing mode

Clients can now enable a testing mode and specify archival policies in minutes instead of days. Now you create and resolve cases, then run archiving process immediately to test the functionality within minutes.

Easier adoptions with enhanced monitoring capabilities

With the addition of the Log-ArchivalSummary class and its associated log files, clients can monitor their archival jobs in a single view. We have also improved logging for archival jobs, offering you greater insight into the success of your archival process.

To learn more about archiving and purging your case data in your Pega Cloud environment, see Improving performance by archiving cases.

Pega Cloud Services support for the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region

Pega Cloud Services now supports deployment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. Deployment across multiple availability zones within a geographical region protects against zone faults and localized service disruptions, and ensures high availability.

For more information about regions and availability zones, see Pega Cloud Services capabilities.

Archival support added to cases in Pega Cloud

You can now create an archival policy to move inactive cases from Pega Cloud to secondary storage. By periodically purging entries from your database, you can improve application performance.

For more information, see Case archiving.

Support for Data streaming service for Pega Cloud Marketing 7.4 applications

Pega Cloud Marketing 7.4 applications support the Kafka-based Stream service featured in Pega Platform 7.4.

Automatic redirection to HTTPS for Pega Cloud Services environments

Pega Cloud Services now redirects HTTP to HTTPS automatically for applications that run in Pega Cloud Services environments. This automatic redirection ensures that your network traffic is always encrypted.

New My Pega Cloud portal with enhanced functionality available

You can use the My Pega Cloud self-service portal to restart an environment, download log files, or view high-level details about  an environment. For more information, see Managing Pega Cloud environments from My Support Portal.

To access this portal, you must have the appropriate site credentials. To manage your support contacts, see the Support Contact Administrator Guide for additional information.

Updated default dynamic system setting for requestor pools

Clients can now enable or disable requestor pools for processing service requests using a new dynamic system setting called EnableRequestorPools with Pega-IntegrationEngine as the owning rulest. Previously, all deployments utilized requestor pools to improve service processing response efficiency; requestor pools eliminated overhead by automatically returning a requestor to the pool after it fulfills a service request. Starting in Pega Platform 8.4, requestor pools are disabled in Client-managed cloud deployments, since these deployments use autoscaling to handle service request traffic. Enabling requestor pools in Kubernetes environments is not recommended, because they can inhibit the default autoscaling settings in the environment.

Requestor pools remain enabled by default in Pega Cloud and on-premises environments.

To help clients navigate this change, Pega has updated its best practice guidance for configuring requestor pools. For an overview, see Requestor pooling for services. For guidance on the use of requestor pools in your application, see the EnableRequestorPools entry in Dynamic system settings data instances.

Upgrade impact

Requestor pools are disabled by default in Pega Platform 8.4 in client-managed cloud deployments. Clients who deployed previous versions of Pega Platform on a Kubernetes environment and who upgrade to Pega Platform 8.4 could see that their services behave differently.

What steps are required to update the application to be compatible with this change?

If clients that are deployed in a Client-managed cloud environment need to configure their services to use requestor pools and they understand how to configure requestor pools for their optimized use, these clients can re-enable requestor pools. Clients should review the best practice for configuring requestor pools before they re-enable requestor pools. To re-enable requestor pools, you modify the EnableRequestorPools setting in the Pega-IntegrationEngine Owning ruleset from “disabled” to Enabled [no value]. For details, see Editing a dynamic system setting.