Introduction

A Helm Release in Mojaloop context refers to a release made on the Helm GitHub repository, which includes a set of core and supporting services that make up a Mojaloop Switch / Hub implementation. For more details regarding a general Helm release, please refer to this blog.

The Mojaloop core-team recently published Helm version v10.1.0 to support features introduced until mid-May. Mojaloop uses a versioning system inspired by the Semantic versioning with an x.y.z format, which also includes the Program Increment (currently PI-10) and the Sprint details. The conventions behind the versioning systems are described here.

 

Helm version v10.1.0

Helm Release v10.1.0 was made available on May 15th, 2020 after extensive internal testing on developer and QA environments that the core team uses. There is a set of postman scripts named Golden Path which is used for regression testing and validation before publishing any Helm Release (These postman scripts can/should be used by everyone interested in deploying or implementing Mojaloop). This is done for all Helm releases on the Release Candidate versions of the Helm codebase, to ensure smooth transition and deployment of the release. The testing phases focus on the deployment aspects and the upgrade scenarios from the most recent previous release of Helm as well.

The Release notes for Helm v10.1.0 contains a few sections and a significant amount of information along with details on individual services.

  • The first section indicates the high-level helm changes and introduces breaking changes discussed in later parts of the notes.
  • The second section gives the details of each of the application versions included in the current Helm Release and in some cases the transition/change in the version of every individual service.
  • The third section contains links to each of the individual service’s release notes; this is quite detailed but also necessary to understand the changes included as part of this release for a particular service.
  • There is a section on “Operational Chart versions” that includes the versions of the monitoring features – EFK and Promfana.
  • There is a section for “Breaking Changes” towards the end that lists breaking changes that are introduced with this helm release; most of the time this will be associated with a new set of test scripts which are specific to this Helm release (and the new changes). Specifically for v10.1.0, breaking changes introduced as part of Settlements V2 are described at a high level.
  • Along with this, a license scan summary is added as an excel sheet to the Release, as part of the CI/CD process.

 

Changes introduced with v10.1.0

Apart from new features introduced as part of upgrades in every different service, some of the changes include the addition of the Mojaloop Simulator charts as part of Mojaloop, so that they can now be deployed by default in development or test/QA environments.

Another significant feature included with this release is Settlements V2. The detailed design for this is described in the Settlement FSD document. This lays the foundation for supporting multi-currency support for Settlements, Continuous Gross Settlements, and Interchange Fees. This introduces Settlement models and several new changes that are discussed in the FSD document and some other changes are currently being implemented.

 

Coming up next..

There are several teams working constantly upgrading Mojaloop core and supporting services, doing bug-fixes and performing maintenance. All the latest releases of all these individual services will be included in the upcoming Helm Release (v10.4.0). Here are some of the features that will be included in the next Helm Release:

  1. With the release of Mojaloop FSP Interoperability (FSPIOP) API v1.1, there are some changes currently being implemented which will be included in the next Helm release. The list of changes introduced as part of FSPIOP API v1.1 are listed in a tracking list on the mojaloop-specification repo and there is a corresponding Epic on GitHub that contains stories for the implementation.
  2. The testing toolkit now has Helm charts and will be introduced with the next Helm release as well.
  3. Features to support JWS signing are now introduced into quoting-service, account-lookup-service and ml-api-adapter, so these will now be part of the upcoming Helm release.

 

If you have any questions or issues with upgrading or deployment, please raise an issue here: https://github.com/mojaloop/project/issues/new/choose and/or reach out on #help-mojaloop channel on Mojaloop Slack.