Container improvements, macOS Big Sur and Java 11 - Retrospective 5.6 is here!

Again an update! The tech world is moving faster and faster, so it's good that there are stable tools like Retrospective that provide fundamental functions for busy IT professionals.

Because Docker and Kubernetes are already almost taken for granted in modern IT architectures, we have once again improved the log search in container logs.

With the upgrade to Java 11, we ensure support and have a clear path for our next upgrade to Java 17. In addition, we were able to meet customer requests for Retrospective on macOS Big Sur.

Improvements for grokking logs from Kubernetes and Docker containers

When container logs are analyzed with Retrospective, it feels different than SSH access to VM logs.

Ephemeral containers can have short lifetimes and Retrospective is supposed to display logs from different containers with inconsistent formatting in a unified view.

In Retrospective, we have now added an option to use the timestamps generated by Kubernetes or Docker, instead of using the timestamps in the log data as we do with SSH logs.

Next time you run a test with a bunch of containers on your dev machine with docker-compose, give it a try!

macOS Big Sur

and then.... Retrospective on macOS Big Sur :-)

...ok, granted, we are relying on the Apple Rosetta 2 framework to make this work.

But hey, the Java world keeps spinning and we keep our fingers crossed that good souls may give us Java support for Apple's Arm M1 chip!

Java 11

And last but not least, a huge thanks to all the brilliant people at https://adoptopenjdk.net. Without your work, we couldn't do an upgrade of Retrospective to Java 11 so smoothly to provide a stable and performing software. Your JDK is rock solid! We wish you a safe journey as you move the coolest JDK on the planet to the Eclipse Foundation at https://adoptium.net.