Published Release Notes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Optimized data schema upgrade

Several improvements have been made to optimize the speed of the data schema upgrade to help you experience minimal downtime during upgrade to Pega Platform 8.5™. The data schema upgrade process optimizations include the following improvements:

• Optimized database index creation during upgrade
• Optimized synchronization process to detect duplicate rules during the application import process
• A new upgrade setting for Pega Cloud® Services operators that reduces the time to upgrade clients that run large Pega applications, such as the CRM Suite

For more information, see Limit upgrade downtime with data schema upgrade improvements (8.5).

Deprecated support for Pega Platform deployments on embedded Cassandra

If you use Pega Platform™ decision management capabilities, Pega Platform uses Cassandra as the underlying storage system for the Decision Data Store (DDS), which manages the Cassandra cluster and stores decision management data in a Cassandra database. Future versions of Pega Platform will no longer support deployments on embedded Cassandra. In Pega Platform version 8.6, deployments using embedded Cassandra are deprecated but still work. To ensure future compatibility, do not create any new installations using embedded Cassandra.

For information about how to configure Pega Platform to access an external database, see Defining Pega Platform access to an external Cassandra database.