Arcus has grown on all fronts this year. Not only has it made 22 releases, but it also received 17 issues from 10 external contributors and 11 pull requests from 6 external members. This is a great number and a good improvement on last year.
This year, we tried to place Arcus in the spotlight, and releasing more frequently was one of the ways to do that. There are some smaller releases in the 22, but each contributes a lot and provides real production value for your project. A higher release rate also meant that we could respond to certain problems more quickly. We are seeing Arcus being adapted and invested in, resulting in more issues and pull requests. Gradually, Arcus is receiving the recognition it deserves.
Service-to-service correlation
Correlation was a hot topic this year. Service-to-service correlation was a feature we were striving for and that we have implemented and improved across all Arcus repositories. The deprecated hierarchical correlation system was implemented in the first round but currently, we are moving toward the new W3C correlation system. This new system allows us to further interact with Microsoft functionality, such as automatically tracking dependencies that interact with Microsoft technologies (Azure SDK, HTTP, SQL). Having automatic dependency tracking is a big selling point for Arcus, as it builds upon existing Microsoft functionality without the need for the consumer to move away from its features. In essence, this is what Arcus is all about: improving existing technology.
Secret management
The Arcus secret store is a great feature that helps you store secrets safely in a dedicated store with a single interaction point, instead of being scattered in the already populated application configuration. This highly-extensible feature is one of the oldest features in our repertoire and it become even better this year.
Versioned and synchronous secret retrieval was added to the Arcus secret store this year too. Secret versions allow you to store multiple versions of a single secret in your registered secret providers. Synchronous secret retrieval is an alternative way of secret retrieval, as opposed to the built-in supported asynchronous way. Both are big internal changes, which have a smaller outward effect. Both were grown from consumer interaction with the secret store, making this great feature all the better.
Rebranding everything Arcus
You might have already noticed the new logo in the statistics diagram. Arcus has received a makeover that makes it a more trendy development tool and hopefully helps us spread the word. We are moving all the Arcus feature documentation pages to this new style and are also rebranding the general Arcus site. It will contain lots more information on the ‘Why/How to use Arcus?’ which is one of the most-asked questions we receive. We have also added some user guides showing a step-by-step guide on how certain Arcus functionalities can be implemented in your application.
.NET 6 for all
.NET Core will be deprecated at the end of this year. Therefore, we have made it our commitment to add .NET 6 support to all Arcus libraries – while still supporting .NET Core. This is a good example of how we use small releases to have a big impact. .NET 6 was a popular requested feature, and we have learned quite a bit about cross-repository changes and how to do this even more smoothly for .NET 8 and beyond (we mostly supportLTS).
Conclusion
Arcus made huge steps towards maturity in 2022. We have released lots of new and enhanced functionality, updated our feature documentation with user guides and other helpful descriptions, and rebranded everything related to Arcus.
Moreover, this list is largely incomplete. There are a lot of technical updates on our repositories that can be looked over in more detail. For more information on our available repositories, see our general Arcus site.
2023 will be a year of further enhancing Arcus to be the best tool it can possibly be. These are some of the open tasks we will be working on:
- IoT Edge module templates in Arcus Templates
- Bicep template support in Arcus Scripting
- Fully support W3C correlation and provide the necessary user guides
- And lots more…
As always, thanks for reading and if you have any ideas, issues, problems or just want to discuss something, don’t hesitate to take a look at any of our Arcus repositories. We are happy to have you.
Thanks for reading!
Arcus team
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