We are incredibly excited to announce that the next major release of our Frame Streaming Gateway (SGA) is now Generally Available! SGA 4 is yet another example of how Dizzion is making Desktop as a Service truly simple. With this release, our customers can provide users with secure external access to their digital workspaces without any need to manage any SSL certificates or load-balancer! Administrators will also benefit from streamlined deployment and enhanced self-service capabilities accessible from the same modern Admin interface.
A Brief History of Frame Streaming Gateway
Before the release of Frame Streaming Gateway in June 2019, most Frame customers relied on third-party VPN or SASE solutions to provide secure external access to Frame workload VMs deployed on private networks. The clear need for an out-of-the-box solution led to the development of Streaming Gateway, offering a more integrated and seamless option for our customers.
With the initial release, SGA 1 simply served as a reverse proxy for Frame Remoting Protocol 7 (FRP7) over Secure WebSocket leveraging NGINX under the hood. In April 2020, we released SGA 2, which introduced our auto-deploy feature for public cloud and introduced improved high-availability. Then, in September 2021, coinciding with the release of our new WebRTC-based Frame Remoting Protocol 8 (FRP8) - SGA 3 was released. SGA 3 represented an architectural leap as it expanded Streaming Gateway's role to also serve as a WebRTC TURN Server to relay data traffic for FRP8 sessions.
Now, almost five years later, we are pleased to introduce Frame Streaming Gateway 4! With this release, the reverse proxy component is removed and only FRP8 sessions will be supported as FRP7 has reached end-of-life. And with the reduced complexity comes some incredible new features…
Built-in Encryption
With the removal of FRP7 and its reliance on TLS, public key certificates (along with expirations/renewals), public wildcard DNS records, and inbound firewall rules for tcp/443 all go away! Instead, FRP8 leverages the built-in encryption capabilities of WebRTC using Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS), which provides the same security capabilities as TLS without the complexity.
Built-in High-Availability
How many times has an improper load-balancing configuration resulted in an unexpected outage? With SGA 4, you now have one less platform to worry about in terms of load-balancing. With the new architecture, individual Streaming Gateways are nodes associated with a specific cluster. This cluster can be used to support one or multiple Frame accounts. Frame’s control plane now handles session load-balancing across available nodes within a cluster. If an SGA node is determined to be unresponsive, Frame will notify the admin and stop sending new sessions to the unresponsive node. This approach also eliminates the costs and complexity associated with acquiring and supporting a load balancer setup, such as F5 or NetScaler.
Streamlined Deployment
For customers who need to manually deploy Frame Streaming Gateway - say goodbye to the SGA Toolbox and generating YAML configuration files! With SGA 4, admins simply generate a one-time registration code via the Frame Console, power on and login to the new SGA node, and paste in the code. The new SGA node will then automatically register with Frame, at which point you can complete your SGA configuration directly from the Frame Console!
Self-Service Administration
In addition to deploying new SGAs, admins will now be able to manage the lifecycle of their SGAs from the Frame Console as well. This includes associating/disassociating SGA nodes from clusters and specifying which SGA cluster a Frame Account should use – no need to open a support case!
It Gets Even Better
The release of SGA 4 is an absolute game-changer and sets a new bar in terms of simplicity and flexibility for the Desktop as a Service industry. But we're not done yet! Features like global load-balancing, predictive power management, and auto-scaling of SGA nodes are all in the works - stay tuned.
If you're ready to learn more about SGA 4, check out our official documentation, talk to your Customer Success Manager, or contact the Dizzion Support. We look forward to your questions and feedback!
For customers who wish to manually deploy SGA 4, you can download the images from our downloads page.
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Yangzhi Zhao