Hello cloud gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton, the author of the Kubernetes Book.
And this is Kubernetes This Month,
the show that brings you all the news and other good stuff going on in the world
of Kubernetes.
First on the agenda my five top Kubernetes news items from the
past month.
So the OCI announced version 1.0 of the container
distribution spec.
So the OCI is a standards body that already brought us the container runtime
spec and the container image spec,
both of which have been absolutely integral to the development of the container
ecosystem. Well, they've added a third standard for how we store,
push and pull images.
Google announced Data Plane v2 for GKE and Anthos clusters.
It's based on eBPF and we'll dig into this one in the deep dive section.
Sticking with eBPF, Microsoft
announced a new open source project to make eBPF work on Windows 10
and modern versions of Windows servers. Now it's early days for the project,
but eBPF is making some massive waves in the industry
and Windows wants in on the action,
which is a huge step away from the Microsoft of the 90s,
that really shunned standard networking protocols. So I say,
good move Microsoft. And to you as a viewer, keep an eye on eBPF.
I've said on previous episodes that I love a good report. Well,
this time it is Snyk's State of Cloud Native Application Security Report.
There's a bunch of interesting stuff in it, as you might expect,
so we'll park that one for the deeper dive section as well.
And last but not least for this month,
Civo announced early availability of their Kubernetes platform based on the
popular lightweight K3s. They're calling it production ready.
And they're saying it's the world's first production ready platform built on K3s
so congrats to the Civo team.
And that wraps up my news highlights for this month.
Okay. So for the deeper dive this month,
we're going to look at Data Plane v2 for GKE and Anthos.
And we'll look at some of the stats from Snyk's recently announced Cloud Native
Application Security Report.
So Google announced this thing called Data Plane v2 for GKE and Anthos.
And it's cool, don't get me wrong,
but I want to start out with it's eBPF routes. In fact,
it seems like everywhere you look at the moment eBPF is making it large. I mean,
we already mentioned that Microsoft are bringing it to Windows. Well,
Data Plane v2 is for GKE and Anthos,
and actually it's only for new GKE and Anthos clusters,
but it gives you Kubernetes intelligence built into the network.
So a network that is aware of Kubernetes. But do you know what,
what does that really mean? Well, in more concrete terms,
you can tag network packets with Kubernetes metadata and Data Plane
v2, by way of eBPF, processes those packets in the kernel,
so it's really fast,
but it has the ability to read the Kubernetes metadata in the packets and
make intelligent networking decisions on the fly.
So it is a proper step in the direction of building and deploying Kubernetes
on networks that understand Kubernetes. Now, as I mentioned,
this implementation in Data Plane v2 is only for GKE and Anthos clusters.
Plus as well you also get automatic network policies and policy logging and
loads more goodness. Oh, and you know what?
It doesn't use kube proxy either so it's really scalable.
Which is all good stuff if you're a Google customer,
but this is the kind of thing we're going to start seeing elsewhere more and
more as Kubernetes becomes the industry standard.
And as things started bending to its will.
Right, I love a good report as a snapshot of what is going on in the industry.
And there's some really interesting stuff and this one, but I have to caveat it,
right? It is based on around 600 customers that responded to the survey.
So no doubt, there's a ton of Snyk customers in there.
And obviously it's people that are deploying cloud native apps.
Either way though 99% of customers that responded to the
survey said that security was an important part of that cloud native strategy.
Well, that's a no brainer.
I want to know who are the 1% that don't think security is important.
More seriously though,
68% of respondents viewed deployment velocity as a major reason
behind their move to containers.
Whereas 67% cited ease of management and 43%
cited reduced costs.
But really interestingly 36% cited improved security.
Now, this is interesting when you consider that containers are universally considered
less secure than virtual machines.
So what I think we're seeing here is the incredible set of tools and the likes
that are built around containers and provide a better overall
security posture. Like for example, image vulnerability scanning.
So you scan your images for known vulnerabilities and you get fancy reports,
but you can also implement logic into your delivery pipelines to automate how
these vulnerabilities are handled. So, yes,
while containers as a runtime might be less secure than VMs,
thanks to the ecosystem and great tooling,
the overall container experience can be more secure.
Now on the topic of containers.
78% Of respondents are deploying workloads as containers with
21% using serverless architectures.
And while over 90% of respondents are using automation only about a
third have fully automated pipelines.
One final thing I'll mention is the high number of security-related incidents
being blamed on misconfiguration. Ouch. Well,
there's more in the report and I recommend you take a look yourself.
You'll find the link below in the resources.
That's it for this month's episode of Kubernetes This Month.
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Same kube time, same kube place.