Joule Release 1.3.0

Overview

We’re excited to unveil a major platform release packed with powerful new capabilities, deeper extensibility, performance upgrades, and a refreshed developer experience. Whether you’re deploying lightweight single-process workloads or orchestrating complex distributed analytics pipelines at scale, this release gives you more control, reliability, and speed than ever before. Let’s dive into what’s new.

New deployment capabilities

This release introduces a comprehensive overhaul of the Joule deployment model, bringing flexibility for both small and large workloads.

Kubernetes-Native cluster deployment

You can now deploy Joule directly on Kubernetes, making it easier to run resilient, distributed analytic workloads in modern cloud environments.

Guardian

Meet Guardian, our new cluster manager responsible for overseeing Joule processor lifecycles, use case deployment and management, maintaining runtime state, and improving cluster reliability.

GuardianDB

A dedicated Joule management database powers persistent cluster metadata, processor state, deployment configuration and making process restarts predictable and fault-tolerant.

Single-Process mode for simplicity

Not every use case needs a cluster. Joule now supports a single-process runtime, perfect for lightweight deployments, development, or embedded scenarios ideal for distributed IoT deployments.

Telemetry

We’ve added basic cluster telemetry, laying the foundation for richer monitoring, debugging, and performance insights.

Introducing Joule CLI

Say hello to joulectl, our new CLI tool that gives developers the power to:

Deploy and manage use cases from your terminal
Inspect cluster topology and deployments

More ways to integrate

We’ve expanded our transport ecosystem with new integrations and enhanced capabilities.

New Transports

Slack - Send proactive alerts directly to Slack channels, keeping teams informed of critical events as they happen
Email - Deliver alerts straight to user inboxes, ensuring important notifications are never missed.
Google Sheets - Dynamically update spreadsheets with real-time support for updates and upserts.

Enhancements

MQTT - Last Will & Testament support and many more enhancements
Kafka - Improved startup lifecycle, commit handling, and inter-service communication for greater stream processing stability and robustness.

Platform enhancements

Use case processing constraints
Introduced execution time limits to guarantee predictable and bounded use case processing.

Analytics

Added last-emitted-event caching for state based pipeline processing.
Extended state management capabilities for multi-tenant use cases.
Support for additional key data types in stateful analytics.

Scripting

Support for Python virtual environments.
Better support for JS multi-threaded concurrency context access.
Updated GraalVM to 24.1.1 to gain enhanced features and performance improvements.

Developer Experience

SDK annotations - Added new processor and transport annotations designed to simplify coding and reduce developer overhead.
Joule Management APIs - Introducing a new suite of REST APIs that lets you deploy, manage, and automate Joule use cases programmatically, empowering teams to build custom operational tools and developer portals.
Getting started project - A full overhaul of the Getting Started project and demos, making it easier than ever for new developers to ramp up in minutes.

General fixes and improvements

This release includes many optimisations and fixes:

Improved process lifecycle management.
Optimised AVRO record handling.
Removed duplicate event processing within analytic windows
Fixed missing CSV headers on file creation and ensured projection order is honoured
Reduced JVM memory requirements through processing and event handling optimisations
Fixed major null bug in object vectorization
Fixed MQTT initialization and serialization string payload handling issues
Improved OpenAPI documentation.

Dependency updates

We’ve updated core platform internals with major dependency upgrades:

GraalVM 24.1.1
DuckDB 1.3.0.0
Jackson 2.18.1
Apache Arrow 18.1.0
Platform JVM 23

Getting started

To get started, download the following resources to prepare your environment and work through the provided documentation. Feel free to reach out with questions.

Download the get started repository from GitLab
Pull the latest docker images from DockerHub
Follow the online tutorials