Word on the Cloud: Keeping you up-to-date on cloud native. Short & sharp!

Kubernetes 1.18 is here!

Congrats to the Kubernetes 1.18 release team. Thanks to them we’ve got our first Kubernetes release of 2020, and I’m smiling!

I think the release team deserve a special shout out this time. Current circumstances are making everything difficult and it’s nice to see things still happening.

So what’s of interest in this release?

As usual, the list is long, so I’ll just pick a few…

Stability

Well, first up, this is another release with the feel of stability to it. And this is a good thing. As much as I love shiny new features, I also love a bit of stability and maturity.

A couple of features that interest me on the stability front are the graduation of PVC Clones and CSI block volumes to stable. I’m adding the finishing touches to my latest Pluralsight (please right-click and open in new tab) video course, and it includes block volumes and PVC Clones, so I’m pretty happy to see both graduate to stable.

Shiny and new

On the shiny new features front….

kubectl debug debuts as an early alpha appearance. Think of this kubectl exec, kubectl port-forward, plus a bunch of other cool debugging stuff all under one command.

Behind the scenes, it spins up an ephemeral container alongside the Pod you’re debugging. Following my recent videos and blog posts about kubectl explain and kubectl verbosity, this is one I’m pretty excited about. But beware… it’s currently alpha, so a bit hairy and scary!

Topology Manager went beta. Think of this as scheduling and resource allocation on steroids. Basically, things are getting more joined up, and it understands hardware-based-offloads like SR-IOV.

Deprecations

Deprecations are always a thing to watch out for, and 1.18 includes some big ones. Check the docs for the full list, but Kubernetes 1.18 will no longer serve anything under apps/v1beta1 or apps/v1beta2. Get yourself on to apps/v1.