SKUDONET Community Edition 7.2.1, released on 21 November 2024, remains the current stable release of SKUDONET’s open-source load balancer. Development of the next Community Edition version is already underway, with work focused on reintroducing URL rewriting capabilities similar to proxy_pass, adopting OWASP Core Rule Set v4 as the default WAF ruleset, and adding cluster configuration from the web interface, among other changes.
Since Community Edition 7.1.0 was released in June 2024, the project has added a ModSecurity-based Web Application Firewall in 7.2.0, followed by updates to the web interface, base system, SNMP configuration and certificate management in 7.2.1.
What’s being developed next
Development of the next Community Edition version is currently underway, with work covering HTTP/S traffic management, clustering, security, performance and the web interface.
One of the areas being worked on is URL rewriting similar to proxy_pass for HTTP/S traffic. This capability is not available in the current 7.x Community Edition releases and is now being implemented on the current HTTP/S proxy.
Another significant change under development is cluster configuration directly from the web management interface. Clustering is already supported in Community Edition, but setting it up currently requires configuration directly on the system. The new implementation will bring that process into the web interface, reducing the amount of manual system-level configuration required to set up and manage a cluster.
Other areas currently under development include:
- OWASP Core Rule Set v4 as the default ruleset for the Web Application Firewall.
- Optimisation of farm startup and statistics processing.
- A redesigned web interface aligned with the interfaces used across other SKUDONET products.
These changes are still work in progress. The final scope may change during development, and there is currently no confirmed release date. Full release notes and upgrade information will be published once the new version is ready.
Community Edition 7.2.1: the current stable release
The web interface was updated to Angular 18, while the underlying system moved to Debian 12.8.
SNMP configuration was also extended to support multiple scopes, allowing more than one source IP to query the load balancer over SNMP.
Other changes affected certificate management, including additional checks when deleting Let’s Encrypt certificates and a fix for cases where the SSL certificate list could appear empty.
Community Edition 7.2: WAF support
Community Edition 7.2.0, released on 22 October 2024, added the IPDS Web Application Firewall module, based on ModSecurity v3.
The release also added geolocation support for WAF rules, Lua 5.2 support and syntax highlighting for SecLang and Lua configurations.
Outside the WAF, SSLv2 and TLSv1 were disabled by default in HTTPS farms, additional checks were introduced for DHCP processes, Farm Guardian binaries were added to backups, and networking and package-update issues were corrected.
Earlier changes: Community Edition 7.1
SKUDONET Community Edition 7.1.0 was released on 19 June 2024. The v7 branch was already based on Debian 12 Bookworm and Linux kernel 6.1, following the migration introduced with Community Edition 7.0 in September 2023.
Version 7.1 added DHCP configuration for NIC and VLAN interfaces, support for using an FQDN as a backend address in HTTP farms, and a TLS 1.3 directive for HTTPS farms. It also added more handling modes for HTTP 100-Continue, QEMU hypervisor detection in the dashboard, a UDP check for Farm Guardian and changes to Let’s Encrypt renewal handling, along with fixes for package dependencies, farm graphs and other system components.
Following the project
SKUDONET Community Edition remains publicly available as the open-source edition of the SKUDONET Application Delivery platform. It provides L4 and L7 load balancing, HTTP/S traffic management, SSL/TLS termination, health checks and, since 7.2, an integrated Web Application Firewall based on ModSecurity v3.
Releases and source code are available on GitHub. Changes across Community Edition versions are also documented in the SKUDONET Timeline, and the Community Forum remains available for technical questions, issue reports and discussions around the platform.
