Hello, Cloud Gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton, the author of The Kubernetes Book,
and this is Kubernetes This Month,
the show that keeps you right up to date with all things Kubernetes.
First off, here's my news roundup for the month.
And it feels like there's been a real rush of new releases before most of the
industry goes into summer mode. Anyway,
first up Hashicorp released Terraform 1.0,
which for me seems crazy. Like I was sure it was already 1.0. I mean,
it's so widely used. Either way, this is a huge milestone for the project,
and I know that they've taken the 1.0 moniker very seriously.
So huge congratulations to the project and everyone involved. Etcd,
the distributed database backing just about every Kubernetes cluster in the
world, announced version 3.5.
Now it's been almost two years since the previous release,
so this one's been a long time in the making,
which for me is a good thing for something as important as a data store.
But what else is good about it is a bunch of the focus for this release has been
on Kubernetes-related performance improvements.
Now I'm not sure when we'll start seeing it with Kubernetes, but when we do,
we should see a good performance uptick, especially on large scale clusters.
The team at Cilium released 1.10 of the popular networking subsystem for
Kubernetes. And it's a pretty big release. So congrats to the team involved,
and we'll take a look at some of the interesting bits from the release in the
deeper dive section. A few things on the Istio front. First up,
the project turned 4, which itself is reason for congratulations, but Istio.io,
the project's website,
also got a fresh new look and they released version 1.10
with improvements to the way Envoy sidecar send traffic to applications among
other things. Speaking of Envoy, though, as of version 1.18.3,
it's now generally available on Windows.
Now this has been another one that's been a long time coming as it's been a goal
of the project for a very long time. And we had an alpha release in early 2020,
so a real achievement for the project and a good day for the wider Windows
community. And then last but not least for this month,
we had another virtual DockerCon event,
and we'll take a closer look at that in the deep dive section as well.
And that wraps the news highlights for this month.
Okay. So this month we're going to deep dive into Cilium 1.10,
and we'll look at some of the announcements from DockerCon. Okay.
So first things first,
Cilium is a leading Kubernetes-focused network technology and
networking, especially integrating with the wider ecosystem,
is becoming a major thing for serious production grade Kubernetes. Well,
a major focus of this 1.10 release is integrating Kubernetes networks
with existing non-Kubernetes networks.
And first off the bat is the Egress IP Gateway. Well,
let me back up just a second to lay out the problem that this solves.
So I think most of us know that scaling operations, self-healing,
rollouts and rollbacks,
all of this stuff causes Pods and containers to come and go on the network like
crazy.
And that amount of dynamism poses real challenges for traditional network
infrastructure like firewalls.
So the idea behind the Egress IP Gateway is to front a set of
dynamic Pods with a static IP address that external systems can address them
by. And of course,
that static IP doesn't change even when the containers and Pods behind it
do.
So instead of traffic from a Pod leaving the cluster via its Node's IP,
it actually gets routed via the Egress Gateway where there's an Egress NAT
policy that fronts it with a consistent IP. And believe me,
this is a huge deal for Kubernetes services that consume,
or are consumed by external services.
Now the 1.10 release also introduces BGP Service Announcements to make
it easier for Kubernetes services to be advertised on external networks.
And it also includes IPAM support for Alibaba cloud.
So on the IPAM front,
Cilium now supports IPAM integration with AWS Azure
and Alibaba cloud. And when I say IPAM support, I mean,
Pods can now get IPs from the underlying cloud network. And of course,
those IPs are directly routable on the underlying cloud network,
proper good stuff.
So huge steps for Cilium and Kubernetes networking in general.
And it's definitely worth a look if you're getting serious about Kubernetes.
Okay.
So last month saw another vibrant DockerCon with over 80,000 registrants.
The Docker Verified Publisher program has been expanded,
and it now includes Red Hat and VMware on the list of over a hundred
publishers signed up to the program.
Now the purpose of the program is to provide trusted software for developers and
organizations to build their applications from. Speaking of which,
Docker Official images,
which set the bar on things like image freshness and implementation of good
practices, well they'll soon be available through other container registries,
including AWS and Mirantis. Also from DockerCon,
Compose V2 is taking big steps forward.
So Composer's always been a popular way to deploy and manage multi-container
apps on Docker,
but it's always been a separate install and it's had its own command line.
Well going forward,
Composer v2 will be built directly into the main Docker CLI.
In fact, it already is if you're using Docker Desktop.
Also though it won't be long before that arrives in the various Docker Linux
packages. On the topic of the CLI actually, Docker scan,
which is also available actually for Docker Desktop users,
well it will soon be available on Docker on Linux as well.
And this is all as image scanning becomes more and more,
just a part of the platform. And you know what,
there's plenty more going on in the Docker side of the containers world,
but I reckon that'll do for now. That's it for this month,
Kubernetes This Month. If you like to show,
be sure to give the episode a big thumbs up. Have a question?
Add it into the comments. Well,
stay safe and I'll be here again next month, so don't forget to subscribe.
Same kube time, same kube place.