feat(post): reana 0.9.3 release announcement (#50)

Co-authored-by: Tibor Šimko <tibor.simko@cern.ch>

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content/posts/2024/reana-0.9.3.md

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+---
+title: "REANA 0.9.3 is released"
+date: 2024-03-13T06:00:00+01:00
+---
+
+REANA 0.9.3 has just been released. This is a minor update that upgrades
+Snakemake workflow engine to version 7, improves job submission performance for
+massively-parallel workflows, improves the clean-up processes for stopped and
+failed workflows, and brings other minor improvements and bug fixes.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## What's new for the users?
+
+### Snakemake version 7
+
+The support of Snakemake workflows has been improved by upgrading from
+Snakemake 6.8.0 to 7.32.4 which brings compatibility with `reana-client` users
+using Python 3.11 or newer versions. Furthermore, you can now make use of the
+many new Snakemake 7 features, including:
+
+- ability to access Snakemake rule variables from Bash scripts
+  ([docs](https://snakemake.readthedocs.io/en/v7.32.3/snakefiles/rules.html#bash));
+- ability to download and upload files to Zenodo
+  ([docs](https://snakemake.readthedocs.io/en/v7.32.3/snakefiles/remote_files.html#zenodo));
+- improved wildcard matching that reduces rule ambiguity problems;
+- improved workflow execution reporting capabilities.
+
+{{< screenshot-browser-mockup src="/images/reana-0.9.3-snakemake-report-output.png" alt="Snakemake report - Workflow output" >}}
+
+### Performance improvements for massively-parallel workflows
+
+Continuing the trend of the last few releases, REANA 0.9.3 brings further
+performance improvements. In particular, the submission and creation of jobs
+orchestrated by massively-parallel workflows has been optimised by avoiding
+unnecessary disk operations that could take a long time in case of workspaces
+containing many files.
+
+The difference is especially noticeable for workflows that generate many
+hundreds of jobs at the same time, such as a scattering process over many
+individual files of a dataset. As an example, a workflow step launching about
+750 fast parallel jobs could have been executed in about half the time.
+
+### ... and more!
+
+The new REANA 0.9.3 release brings other small improvements and bug fixes.
+
+On the REANA cluster side, the submission of Snakemake jobs has been improved
+to avoid situations where a job could previously fail with a
+`FileNotFoundError` due to the unsynchronized disk file access when spawning
+asynchronous jobs. Moreover, the workflow engine logs for stopped workflows are
+now correctly captured and exposed in logs.
+
+On the REANA web interface side, the launcher badge creator fixes URLs in the
+generated Markdown snippets. Furthermore, the web interface and the
+command-line client now report the correct workflow duration for stopped and
+failed workflows.
+
+Please see the detailed [REANA 0.9.3 release
+notes](https://github.com/reanahub/reana/releases/tag/0.9.3) for the complete
+list of all changes.
+
+## What's new for the administrators?
+
+### Better handling of stopped workflows
+
+When a workflow failed or was stopped by the user, it could previously happen
+that some jobs would not be stopped and cleaned up automatically. If this
+occurred, the jobs would continue running until they either finished or failed,
+thus utilising computing resources unnecessarily. Furthermore, these jobs were
+needed to be cleaned up manually from the Kubernetes cluster by the REANA
+administrator.
+
+REANA 0.9.3 improves the situation by making sure that all jobs are cleaned up
+before stopping the execution of a workflow. This should result in less cluster
+maintenance and a better utilisation of the available computing resources.
+
+### Customising environment of job controller and workflow engines
+
+REANA 0.9.3 brings a new possibility to customise environment variables that
+are to be passed to REANA workflow engine and job controller components when
+running user jobs. This can be achieved via the following new Helm values:
+
+- `components.reana_job_controller.environment`
+- `components.reana_workflow_engine_cwl.environment`
+- `components.reana_workflow_engine_serial.environment`
+- `components.reana_workflow_engine_snakemake.environment`
+- `components.reana_workflow_engine_yadage.environment`
+
+As an example, it is now possible to configure a custom limit for the maximum
+number of parallel jobs that Snakemake is allowed to run in parallel to modify
+the default hard-coded value. Here is an example on how to allow for up to 1000
+parallel Snakemake jobs in your `values.yaml`:
+
+```yaml
+components:
+  reana_workflow_engine_snakemake:
+    environment:
+      SNAKEMAKE_MAX_PARALLEL_JOBS: 1000
+```
+
+This could be suitable for massively-parallel workflows if your cluster
+consists of sufficient amount of computing nodes to allow such a workload.
+
+### Customising PostgreSQL Docker image
+
+REANA 0.9.3 also provides a new Helm value that can be used to customise the
+image (and thus the version) of the internal PostgreSQL database. The default
+version of database provided by REANA has been PostgreSQL 12.13 with the
+official Docker image `docker.io/library/postgres:12.13`.
+
+This will change in the next REANA major release series where the default will
+become PostgreSQL 14. If you are using the internal REANA database deployed
+inside the cluster, you will eventually have to migrate to the new version of
+PostgreSQL sooner or later in the future. The new Helm value allows you to set
+the desired PostgreSQL version, for example as a temporary measure to change
+the image back to the one you use currently:
+
+```yaml
+components:
+    reana_db:
+      image: docker.io/library/postgres:12.13
+```
+
+We shall provide detailed example of the database upgrade in due time as part
+of the next REANA release series. Until then, you may skip this possibility or
+you may forward-configure the desired database version by means of the new Helm
+variable.
+
+### How to upgrade existing REANA 0.9.2 clusters
+
+If you are a REANA cluster administrator and you would like to upgrade from
+REANA 0.9.2 to REANA 0.9.3, you can proceed as follows.
+
+Firstly, please note that you can optionally define some of the new [Helm
+values](https://github.com/reanahub/reana/blob/0.9.3/helm/reana/README.md),
+notably:
+
+- `components.reana_db.image` to choose the PostgreSQL Docker image;
+- `components.reana_job_controller.environment` to add additional environment
+  variables to reana-job-controller's container;
+- `components.reana_ui.privacy_notice_url` to add a link to your privacy notice
+  in the web interface;
+- `components.reana_workflow_engine_cwl.environment`,
+  `components.reana_workflow_engine_serial.environment`,
+  `components.reana_workflow_engine_snakemake.environment`, and
+  `components.reana_workflow_engine_yadage.environment` to customise the
+  environment variables of workflow engine's containers.
+
+You can edit your Helm values file to add any desired new values:
+
+```console
+$ vim myvalues.yaml
+```
+
+This is however fully optional and you can simply reuse your current
+`myvalues.yaml` file without any changes to perform the 0.9.2 to 0.9.3 upgrade.
+
+Secondly, you can use the [Helm diff
+plugin](https://github.com/databus23/helm-diff) to inspect the forthcoming
+changes and then perform the upgrade using the standard Helm commands:
+
+```console
+$ helm repo update
+$ helm diff upgrade reana reanahub/reana --version 0.9.3 --values myvalues.yaml
+$ helm upgrade reana reanahub/reana --version 0.9.3 --values myvalues.yaml
+```
+
+### More information
+
+Please see the detailed [REANA 0.9.3 release
+notes](https://github.com/reanahub/reana/releases/tag/0.9.3) for the complete
+list of all changes.
+
+Enjoy!