Hello, Cloud Gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton. And in this month's show,
we're bringing you all the best stuff from the latest and greatest release of
Kubernetes. That's version 1.22.
Plus we'll bring you five other important announcements that you definitely
don't want to miss. And speaking of not wanting to miss out,
make sure you sign up to the show so you don't miss a month.
So straight into Kubernetes, 1.22.
This is the second release of 2021,
but it's the very first release of the new elongated release cycle.
So in July of this year,
the release team merged a Kubernetes enhancement proposal flipping the number of
Kubernetes releases per year down from four to three. Well,
this one is the first one under that new longer release cycle. Well,
the release version is 1.22, we've already said that,
and it is code-named "Reaching New Peaks", and this is the logo.
Well on the numbers front okay.
It's packing a total of 53 enhancements.
Now 13 of those are features graduating to stable,
so things that we now consider production ready.
24 of the features have moved into beta,
and we welcome 16 brand new features into alpha. But do you know what,
just as important as the new stuff is the stuff that's going away.
So we've got 3 features being deprecated,
but more importantly,
10 previously deprecated features are actually being ripped out and
removed. Well on the new features front,
I think the biggest one for me is the switch to etcd 3.5. Now,
earlier this year,
we told you all about the release of etcd 3.5 and how it importantly had major
improvements for Kubernetes,
especially larger busier Kubernetes clusters where etcd,
if we're being honest, was often a bottleneck on performance. Well,
at that time we said that although etcd 3.5 was here,
we had to wait for the Kubernetes project to adopt it.
I'm really pleased that they didn't make us wait long.
Kubernetes 1.22 now ships with etcd 3.5.
Now look for sure it's mainly behind the scenes improvements,
but they span everything from security and logging through to much needed
performance improvements. Now also on the GA, or the stable,
front external credentials plugins finally went stable after being in
beta for 10 versions.
Window support for CSI plugins also went GA.
Now on the alpha front I think that swap memory support and default profiles for
seccomp will be really important for the future. So on the swap memory front,
of course it's only alpha remember,
but work is in progress to support cluster nodes with swap memory enabled.
And then on the seccomp front,
well seccomp is obviously a Linux technology for improving security and work is
in progress for creating default seccomp profiles that will give us,
and this is out of the box okay,
but much better security than the current approach - basically living the front
door wide open. Again though, it's only alpha for now,
but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Well,
last but most definitely not least.
And do you know what of potentially serious impact if you don't plan for it,
but 10 deprecated features are finally being ripped out of Kubernetes and
will no longer work.
Now the full list of these are shown on the Kubernetes website, but for me,
Ingress and custom resource definitions are big ones because they're pretty
widely used. So if you're using any of these,
and I mean the whole 10 that are being removed right, you need to plan,
plan and do even more planning before you even think about flipping the switch
to Kubernetes 1.22.
In other significant news that you definitely don't want to mess, Linkerd,
the popular and simple service mesh, it graduated the CNCF.
So massive congratulations to everybody involved with the project.
And I liked one of their taglines,
"A victory for simplicity in a space notorious for complexity."
So do you know what?
As service meshes become more and more an integral component of production
Kubernetes deployment, Linkerd is most definitely worth a look,
especially if you're looking for simplicity.
Now, staying with the service mesh space,
Istio announced version 1.11 with features and improvements including the CNI
plugin going to beta to help solve some of the security requirements around init
containers. But also beta support for the external control plane,
where the Istio control plane itself can be hosted on an external cluster.
Now over into the public cloud space.
Google announced GKE LoadBalancer uptime checks.
And I love stuff like this because it's all vital for running Kubernetes in
production. So for example, right,
monitoring the uptime of services is mega important in production environments.
So Google adding dedicated uptime checks for LoadBalancer in GKE
environments, another huge step in the right direction.
Over into the networking space.
Now we have said in previous episodes that eBPF is really starting to
rock the networking world.
And some of the folks playing with it are doing potentially game-changing
integrations with Kubernetes.
So we're talking stuff like a programmable network with intelligence to
understand Kubernetes and optimize itself for it. Anyway,
a bunch of the major industry players just announced the eBPF Foundation to
drive all this kind of stuff forward. Now,
the Foundation itself will live within the Linux Foundation. And like I said,
it'll drive development and adoption of eBPF,
but it'll also organize and host eBPF-related events.
That's it for this month's edition of Kubernetes This Month.
If you liked the show, be sure to give the episode a big thumbs up.
Have a question? Add it in to 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.