Hello Cloud Gurus.
I'm Nigel Poulton author of the Kubernetes Deep Dive video course here on A
Cloud Guru and welcome to Kubernete's This Month.
As always I hope that you're all safe and well.
So we'll start out with a roundup of the major news from the Kubernetes in
cloud native space.
We'll pick a couple of the more interesting items and dive a bit deeper,
and then we'll finish things up with your chance to test your Kubernetes
knowledge with a brand new Guru of the Month question.
So grab a comfy seat and maybe a drink and let's find out what's been going down
in the world of Kubernetes.
First up this month,
Mirantis just released Docker Enterprise 3.1.
So congratulations to the team there.
And we'll take a closer look at that in the deeper dive section.
Over into the hosted Kubernetes space,
Azure Kubernetes service AKS has Kubernetes 1.18
versions available in preview. I'll have some of that.
Linode announced general availability of LKE their hosted Linode
Kubernetes Engine. And honestly, I've had a good play around with it,
and it is probably the simplest hosted Kubernetes I have ever seen.
Congratulations Linode. Switching focus to security,
Google Kubernetes Engine GKE has moved container threat detection into
beta. Now at a high level,
this watches for common runtime attacks and it reports them up through the
native tooling like security command center and cloud logging.
StackRox they've announced new runtime security features in their StackRox
Kubernetes security platform,
things like container specific federal information systems checks such
as NIST SP 800-53.
Docker Desktop is now GA on Windows 10 with the WSL 2 subsystem.
Now, this is great. If you're a windows laptop user,
and you're working with Linux containers, because WSL,
the windows subsystem for Linux allows for faster Linux containers.
And it means you can now run Docker Desktop on windows 10 home edition,
and loads of people are gonna love that. Out into the wider ecosystem now,
and ISTIO released version 1.6 with simplify, simplify,
simplify as the tagline.
Now the overall architecture is simpler with ISTIO D now doing away with
Citadel, Gallery, and the sidecar injector,
plus this easier upgrades and even canaried control plane upgrades,
which I love the idea of.
Harbor,
the OCI compliant registry for more than just container images released version
2.0. So congratulations there.
The CNCF released a commissioned report on the state of cloud native
development. Now I quite like skimming through reports like this,
and if you've got a few minutes, I definitely recommend it's worth a skim.
And I think rounding up the news for this month,
the CNCF again has announced this time that Dan Kohn,
the longtime leader of the CNCF has stepped down and will be replaced by
Priyanka Sharma who will be General Manager.
Now Dan's moving into a new role in the Linux foundation and I'd like to thank
him for everything that he did.
And of course I'd like to wish Priyanka all the best in her new role at the top
of the CNCF.
And that gurus wraps the news for this month.
Let's take a deeper dive into Docker enterprise 3.1,
and the security stuff that we're about to see with the Docker and Snyk
partnership.
Okay,
look, this is a show about Kubernetes so why so much Docker?
Well on this particular topic,
Docker Enterprise,
it is an enterprise grade Kubernetes platform and this 3.1 release
is the first sinse Mirantis acquired the technology from Docker Inc.
So I think it can potentially tell us a lot about what we can expect in the
future from Mirantis. Well, first off with this release,
it supports Kubernetes 1.17.
And when you consider that 1.18 is pretty much still warm from the press,
1.17 is decently up to date for an enterprise grade platform.
There's also support for Windows server 2019 nodes. Meaning of course,
as well, support for windows apps. There's better support for GPUs
so that includes easiest scheduling to GPU nodes plus easier implementation
of GPU related policies.
There's simplified installation of the ISTIO service mesh with sensible out of
the box defaults. And importantly,
I think for any platform claiming or aiming to be enterprise grade,
there's improved SLAs for mission critical apps, not bad in my book.
Okay. More on Docker again, and this time on the security front.
So I'm including these updates in the Deeper Dive section because a lot of
us use Docker Desktop and Docker Hub. In fact,
I got a new computer the other day and pretty much the first thing I installed
when I flipped the power on was Docker Desktop. Well anyway,
apparently the single most requested feature people have been asking for from
Docker is integrated scanning. Well,
this partnership with Snyk will definitely bring that,
we should expect to see Docker Desktop and Docker Hub,
both offering integrated vulnerability,
scanning of images plus suggested remediations.
And the whole idea with this, right, is that you don't have to be anything,
even approaching a security expert,
to be able to work with it and leverage its power.
Now, another interesting feature should be the ability for Snyk to analyze your
packages, recommend official Docker base images,
and then even notify you when Docker releases updates to those base images.
You know, maybe you might need some fixes that are included.
Now look, it's early days, but I think all in all, it's a great thing. I mean,
it's hard not to like something that's integrating simple to use security and
that wraps our Deeper Dive section.
Okay. Guru of the Month,
last month we asked which native Kubernetes technology you'd use to
enforce a cluster wide policy to block privileged containers from a cluster?
And the correct answer was A:
Enable the PSP admission controller and create a pod security policy.
And, Oh my goodness, we had some top quality answers. In fact,
I scribbled a few of my own notes while I was reading through some of them.
Anyway, look, there can only be one winner. And this month it's Borko Djurkovic.
Now Borko is a Cloud Solutions Architect from Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.
And he's going to be getting a goody bag in the post from us.
Now I've said this before, right?
But I really appreciate all the responses and the detail that some of you go
into is just magic. Actually, I feel bad that we can't pick more winners,
but the rules are the rules and Borko is our winner this month.
Thanks to everyone else though.
This month's brand new question is in the forum link below.
So you go ahead and test your knowledge this month and then as always hope to
see you all again next month, same Kube time, same Kube place.