Important announcements

The following deprecations or breaking changes are announced with release 10.10.

Core platform

Change in measurement validation

Cumulocity IoT has already recommended (and documented) the use of numeric value measurements. However this rule has not been enforced up until now. With one of the future releases, the numeric values will be enforced, and measurement values of types other than numeric, for example maps and nulls, will no longer be accepted. This means that customers will have to proactively change the measurement values to numeric-only to send the correct values. Existing data will not be erased from the storage.

Device Management - Removal of groups note

Currently, there are two places in the Device Management application for adding notes to a group, that is, either using the notes area or the group data notes field on the Info tab of a group. With release 10.11, the first option will be removed from the UI. The old group notes will still be accessible using the REST APIs but won’t be displayed anymore within the Device Management UI.

Furthermore, with the introduction of a new group view, the information from the current Info and Subasset tabs will be combined in order to enhance usability.

Web SDK - Font awesome icons replaced by new icons

Info
This change will only affect you if you or your development team use the Web SDK to extend default Cumulocity IoT UI applications (Cockpit, Administration, Device Management) or to build your own web applications.

With release 10.10, “font awesome” icons are replaced by a larger set of icons aligned with the icons used by the Delite Design System from Software AG. The font awesome library will no longer be used in the Cumulocity IoT Web SDK. All CSS classes with the prefix fa-** are now updated to use the dlt-c8y-icon-** prefix, keeping the icon name unchanged. The c8y-icon directive was also updated to reflect this behavior. fa-** utility classes were also changed and now use a more generic prefix: icon-**.

To use these icons, developers are asked to follow the c8y-icon directive.

Re-introducing weak ciphers for MQTT (over TLS) connections

Cumulocity IoT is re-introducing the support for AES-CBC ciphers for MQTT(over TLS) connections.

What does this mean and how does it impact you?

The Cumulocity IoT platform continually improves its security posture by regularly updating support for the latest standards and protocols. With the 10.10 release, we removed support for weak ciphers for MQTT (over TLS) connections. Unfortunately some customers' devices could not upgrade to the stronger ciphers and were therefore unable to connect to the platform. We have therefore reinstated the weaker ciphers in the 10.10 and subsequent releases.

To enable customers with self-hosted or dedicated environments to determine which strength of cipher to support for MQTT over TLS new configurable values have been introduced. This configuration is only available to the Management tenant; further information on how to set this configuration can be found in the Cumulocity IoT platform - Operations guide.

Enforcement of user passwords to meet password complexity

When the use of green passwords is enforced and the minimal strong password length (system.password.green.min-length property) is higher than the device password length (device-user.password.length property), the system will use the green.min-length value, that means, generate a longer password. Prior to this change, the system rejected auto-generated passwords that were too short blocking device bootstrap.

Streaming Analytics

Change in tenant options

From the 10.10 GA release, the apama category of the tenant options is deprecated. Instead the streaminganalytics category is being used. The Apama-ctrl microservice previously restarted if a change was detected in the apama category. This will no longer happen. Instead, automatic restarts will happen for the streaminganalytics category. The behavior of options in the analytics.builder category is unchanged.

Cumulocity IoT transport in Apama

The GenericResponse.body member is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release. It is recommended that you now use the GenericResponse.getBody action instead. See the com.apama.cumulocity package in the API Reference for EPL (ApamaDoc) for more information on the GenericResponse event.

Machine learning