What's New in the October 2021 Payara Platform Release?

The October 2021 Payara Platform release is here!  Payara Platform Enterprise 5.32.0 includes 8 improvements, 9 bug fixes, 1 security fix, and 5 component upgrades. The Payara Platform Community 5.2021.8 release offers 7 improvements, 7 bug fixes, 1 security fix, and 5 component upgrades. 

You can download Payara Platform Community 5.2021.8here and request Payara Platform Enterprise 5.32.0 here. 

And don't forget to join the 'October Release Overview + Client Certificate Authentication and Security Realms in Payara' webinar with Rudy De Busscher on October 26th 2021 3 PM BST.  Find out more & registerhere.

We also invite you to participate in the Payara Platform Survey- for your chance to win one of two $25 Amazon vouchers. The survey is mostly multiple choice and takes about 6 minutes to complete. Thank you!

Read more below to learn more about the highlights of this release.

Breaking Change for Payara Enterprise Only: Hazelcast 4 Upgrade

As Hazelcast is an important building block of Payara Platform, upgrading took a while to stabilize and test out the improved distribution of data between the different nodes. The Hazelcast upgrade is now complete in Payara Enterprise 5.32.0 which means there is no rolling upgrade possible due to the changes within Hazelcast. A domain or set of Payara Micro instances having a mixture of Hazelcast 3.x and Hazelcast 4.x results in errors.

Since the Cluster Password is no longer supported on Hazelcast, the asadmin command `set-hazelcast-configuration` no longer has the optional `--clusterPassword` option.

Since there is no rolling upgrade possible, you need to stop all instances in the Payara Server Domain or stop all Payara Micro Instances that are joined through the same Data Grid, and start it again with the new version.

Validity Check on Client Certificates

We're continuing our recent expansion of the Client Certificates improvements in this release. The July and September 2021 Payara Platform releases contained Client Certificate Authentication improvements, including the ability to define multiple TrustStores and implementation of an SPI to allow developers to perform additional checks on the Client Certificate.

In both Payara Community and Payara Enterprise Editions, up until now, any Client Certificate that is used and matched within the KeyStore was accepted, even when the certificate was expired. By default, Payara checks only if the submitted Client Certificate is present in the TrustStore and if it is found, it is accepted without any additional checks.

We have now enforced an additional check when using the Client Certificate authentication option to ensure the certificate is valid.

You'll need to activate the new validity check on Client Certificates if you're using Payara Enterprise as we wanted to maintain the backward compatibility. Use the following asadmin command:

asadmin set configs.config.<config-name>.security-service.auth-realm.certificate.property.certificate-validation=true

Configure Details of HTTP GZIP Compression

Previous versions of the Payara Platform Community and Enterprise Editions supported GZip compression, but only some default configuration values for compression level and algorithm were used. In the October 2021 Payara Platform releases, the compression level and algorithm configuration values are now configurable. 

There are two new configuration parameters added to enable configuration of the compression level and algorithm of the GZip compression supported within Payara. You can configure them via the command line or the Admin Console.

Add Placeholder for Instance Names in Custom Vendor Metrics

In previous versions of Payara Platform Community and Enterprise Editions, the Custom Vendor Metrics file did not provide the option to define a placeholder for the instance if the MicroProfile Metrics were requested. That means when a JMX bean had a name which contained the instance name (like number of requests), the Custom Vendor Metrics file could not be used to expose the value.

In the October 2021 Payara Platform releases, the JMX bean values can be exported with MicroProfile Metrics. A placeholder is added for the instance so the configuration can also be used when the JMX bean contains instance-specific values. See documentation Custom Vendor Metrics - Instance names.

Payara Micro and JDK17

Payara Micro already runs on JDK17 but we are aware not all specifications work without issues. For example,  JPA-Eclipselink still has problems. Full support for running Payara Micro on JDK 17 will come in a future release.