Migration to V4

Why migrate to EVA ICS v4

Total refactoring. Most of EVA ICS code has been rewritten in Rust - a modern language, which provides near-C speeds with no safety costs. According to tests of typical customers’ tasks, version 4 is about 50x faster than v3.
New micro-core model. With the new model, all item logic has been moved to external services, which allows version 4 to process dozens of millions items on a single node, about 1000x more than in v3.
Node scalability. V4 node has extremely great multiprocessing support and memory management and can utilize as much system resources as there are available. Furthermore, for heavy-loaded systems, nodes can be split into multiple “points”, by moving services to neighbor computers.
Local clusters. In addition to node-to-cloud formations, heavy-loaded nodes can be split on local points, which run on different machines. See Local clustering and secondary points.
New AAA. The new Authentication, authorization and accounting architecture, much cleaner and much more powerful.
IaC and Deployment for everything. V3 had great deployment features, but V4 is much better - everything can be deployed, undeployed and redeployed as on a single node, as on all selected nodes of customers’ clouds.
Extension unification. Version 3 had six types of extension. In version 4 there is the only one type of extension - services. Which communicate with the core and between each other using BUS/RT - an in-house IPC-bus, developed especially for high-loaded industrial applications.
Automation logic. V3 had the only logic snippets: Python macros. In V4 lmacro no longer means a Python script with lots of built-ins, but ANY scenario, executed by a software or hardware PLC, written in any language and optimized especially for customers’ needs.
Backward compatibility. Reborn inside, refactored outside. EVA ICS v4 is 99.9% compatible with all existing HMI web applications and almost with all V3 Python macros.
Nevertheless, zero vendor lock-in. EVA ICS is still open-source, open-licensed, can work with any equipment and requires no vendor-cloud connection. You build your cloud - you own your cloud. Private and secure.

Migration

V3 nodes in V4 cluster

V3 nodes can be connected as secondaries to V4 nodes, see Legacy (V3) replication service for more details.

The service provides all replication and interaction features, however there is not possible to do remote deployment for V3 nodes from V4 central ones.

For the deployment tasks, consider leaving a few V3 SFA nodes and connect secondaries to both V3 and V4 centrals.

V3 and V4 nodes on the same machine

EVA ICS v3 and v4 can live on the same machine with no problems and do not interfere each other.

Logic

EVA ICS v4 core has the minimal logic to improve its speed and scalability.

The only in-core logic is:

logic.range item property, which sets the status to -1 (ERROR) if the value is non-numeric or out-of-range.
lvar op functions (set/reset/clear/toggle)
when lvar status is set to 0, the state can not be updated with RAW events, unless “force” field is present and set to true

Note

The v4 lvar logic is different from v3: while v3 functions reset/clear/toggle operate with lvar value, v4 functions modify lvar status.

The logic is implemented this way because v4 lvars have got “enabled” property, which replaces zero-status. When migrating to v4, consider carefully reviewing v3 macros and scripts, especially timers.

To avoid logic confusion, it is not recommended to mix v3 and v4 lvars in a single cloud.

Item states

unit nstatus/nvalue fields are removed. Instead, units now have “act” field, which is larger than zero if actions are pending/running.
item expiration is handled now by external state expiration services. To let EVA JS framework handle lvar timers correctly, BOTH an expiration service must be setup plus “meta.expires” lvar field set.

AAA

EVA ICS v4 AAA-model is very similar to v3 but refactored

Users are no longer created on top of API keys
Access control lists are moved to a dedicated entity
Both users and API keys authorization is based on top of a single or multiple ACLs
ACL structure has been refactored: EVA ICS v4 no longer uses “items” and “groups”, which had been pretty confusing but OID masks instead
Custom authentication providers can be implemented
The standard ACL structure can be extended by custom authorization providers as well
Resource authentication has been moved to high-speed B-Tree algorithms

See Authentication, authorization and accounting for more info.

HMI

General info

the item state field “set_time” has been changed to “t”
the item state field “controller_id” has been changed to “node”
the item state fields “description” and “location” are no longer available. Instead, use “meta” field, which can contain any customizable object.

Administration methods

All system methods have been moved to bus calls.

Calling methods of other services

See x::<TARGET_SVC>::<METHOD>.

HMI HTTP API methods

Methods were changed as the following:

V3 method	V4 Method
test	test (unchanged)
login	login (unchanged)
logout	logout (“k” parameter changed to “a”)
state	item.state
state_history	item.state_history (accepts timestamps only)
check_item_access	item.check_access
state_log	item.state_log
log_get	log.get
action	action (unchanged)
action_toggle	action.toggle
result	action.result
kill	action.kill
terminate	action.terminate
run	run (unchanged)
set	lvar.set
reset	lvar.reset
clear	lvar.clear
toggle	lvar.toggle
increment	lvar.incr
decrement	lvar.decr
get_neighbor_list	session.list_neighbors
set_token_readonly	session.set_readonly

V3 methods, listed above, still work, but are deprecated and will be removed soon. Please update your HMI applications to use the new method names.

Serving data from the registry

/%pvt URI has been replaced with /:pvt, as “%” in URI field may cause problems for certain clients.
/%pub URI has been replaced with /:pub for the same reason.

Server templates

V4 HMI service provides tera templates, which have functionality similar to Jinja2, however some complex structures may be incompatible. Consider testing all server templates before migrating production applications.

V4 HMI templates have no built-in functions at the moment, for built-in variables, see Server Templates.

HMI tokens

HMI service issues session tokens only for user/password pair. Tokens for API keys are not supported.

HMI web sockets

HMI web sockets can be connected using session tokens only
When subscribed to logs, note that “warning” level has been changed to “warn”.

HMI PVT/RPVT

Certain pvt/rpvt functions (directory listing, image processing) have been removed. Use custom intermediate RPVT servers instead (e.g. cctvproxy for camera image processing).

RPVT calls are slightly modified to make ACLs more clear and simple.

EVA JS Framework

If EVA ICS JS Framework is used, there is no need to migrate a HMI web application, as the framework does everything.

The only steps are required:

update the framework to the version 0.3.40 or above.
change names of deprecated HTTP RPC methods to the new ones (open either server logs or Web browser development console to see which deprecated methods are called)

EVA JS Framework WASM extension

The old framework WASM extension builds are not compatible with EVA ICS v4. Ask your Enterprise pack vendor to provide a new extension tar-ball.

Python macros

All macro functions now require OIDs, calling methods with short IDs is not allowed any longer.
Macros do not have the global variable “_source” any longer.
Macro arguments / keyword arguments are no longer converted to integers/floats automatically (except if run with eva-shell)
Macro extensions are no longer supported and should be converted either into Python modules or in EVA ICS services.

Deployment

As v4 has brand-new internal architecture, IaC and deployment has been significantly modified. Consider migrating deployment files.

Item scripts

There are no item scripts support in v4 core, however Script runner controller provides the very same functionality. Note that some options are changed:

action scripts no longer receive unit id as the first argument

UDP API

There is no UC UDP API in v4, however SNMP/UDP trap handler provides the very same functionality.