---
layout: docs
page_title: 1.8.0
description: |-
  This page contains release notes for Vault 1.8.0.
---

# Vault 1.8.0

## Vault 1.8 Release Highlights

**Licensing Changes:** There are a few key licensing changes that are introduced with 1.8:

- Autoloading of licenses which simplifies the license installation workflow via the ability to load a license from an environment variable or from the disk
- The need for a valid license for Vault to successfully boot-up for EULA compliance.
- The license can be in-storage (as is the case prior to 1.8), providing a seamless experience when existing clusters are upgraded to 1.8. Support for in-storage licenses will be removed in a future release, and so it is recommended that customers migrate to autoloaded licenses.
- For new cluster deployments, licenses must be autoloaded.
- Support for license-free trial period for Enterprise binaries (30 min/6h) has been removed, and a default 1-day grace time for eval licenses has now been introduced.

**Vault Diagnose:** A new `vault operator diagnose` command enables faster troubleshooting and user-friendly diagnostics in situations when Vault is not starting.

### Secrets Engine Enhancements

- **Key Management Secrets Engine (Enterprise ADP-KM Module Only)**: Key Management Secrets Engine that was released as generally available for Azure in Vault 1.7, is now generally available for AWS.
- **UI for the Database Secrets Engine:** Expansion of the UI for the database secrets engine, allowing for users to interact with MSSQL and MySQL database engines via the Vault UI.
- **GCP Static Accounts:** The GCP secrets engine now has the ability to use existing service accounts for generation of service account keys and access tokens.
- **Username templating:** With Vault 1.8 users have the ability to customize usernames for the snowflake, redshift, elasticsearch, influxdb, rabbitmq and mongodb atlas database engines.
- **Active Directory:** Vault now has the ability to manually rotate a credential for an account being managed via the AD secrets engine.

### Other Enhancements

- **ServiceNow Credential Resolver:** Vault can now act as an external credential store for the ServiceNow MID servers when using a ServiceNow workflow for service discovery
- **RedHat certified helm charts:** Vault’s Kubernetes Helm charts are now certified by RedHat!
- **Integrated Storage Autopilot:** Autopilot capabilities to monitor and manage clusters are now supported with DR.
- **SSH Secrets Engine identity template support:** When configuring a role for the SSH Secrets Engine, users may now specify Vault identity templates in the _default_extensions_ field. This allows Vault to conform to the required identity semantics for services such as GitHub Enterprise when functioning as an SSH CA.

- **Expiration manager improvements**

  - Fair-sharing logic to help with lease revocations
  - The ability to mark some leases as irrevocable
  - The addition of an HTTP API and a CLI for operators to obtain information about irrevocable leases, to be able to tidy them

- **Vault Agent Enhancements:** The following Vault Agent enhancements have been added to 1.8 to improve the operational experience.

  - **Infinite Retry:** This release reintroduces the default behavior of agent template indefinitely retrying and not exit on failures.
  - **Configurable timeout for non-renewable secrets:** Agent template now has the ability to configure how often to fetch non-renewable secrets (from the default 5m)
  - **Update Agent Auth with GCP to use new SignJWT endpoint:** This enhancement should benefit GCP customers who want to use the Vault Agent to authenticate using GCP’s IAM Service Account Credentials for signing JWTs.

- **Control Group triggers:** This enhancement provides flexibility to customers to apply control groups to only certain permissions in a path. Vault now supports a new parameter called controlled_capabilities in the control_group stanza factors. This is a list of permissions, which when invoked will result in the control group workflow only being triggered if the operation that initiated the request is included in the list.
- **Password policies in namespaces:** Vault now supports setting up password policies in namespaces
- **Obscuring secret Values in the UI:** Vault now provides the ability to mask secrets on entry - whether they be KV secrets or certificates - anywhere secrets are entered in the UI.

### Deprecations:

The following API endpoints have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

- `POST sys/license` to store licenses in storage; it is recommended to use
  [License Autoloading](/docs/enterprise/license/autoloading) instead.

- `/gcp/token/:roleset` and `/gcp/key/:roleset` paths for generating secrets for rolesets

For more detailed information, please refer to the [Changelog](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md).