Hello, cloud gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton the author of The Kubernetes Book.
And this is Kubernetes This Month.
The show that brings you up to date with all the cool news and other good stuff
going on in the world of Kubernetes.
First up,
here are my five top Kubernetes news items from the past month.
Well, look,
I think front and center is obviously the announcement of Kubernetes 1.21.
And as with all new releases,
there is a ton of interesting stuff to sift through.
So we'll park it for now and we'll take a proper look in the deep dive section.
A new Kubernetes alpha feature called the Gateway API is looking to
improve Ingress networking, and potentially, I don't know,
even outright replace the current Ingress feature. I mean,
those are my words, right?
But the thing is Ingress networking in general is an interesting
area.
And it's one you need to give quite a bit of thought to when designing your apps
and infrastructure.
So we'll take a closer look at that one in the deep dive section as well.
On the deprecations front PodSecurityPolicies,
despite never even making it to general availability have been deprecated.
And we could even see them gone as soon as Kubernetes 1.25,
though, to be fair, that's going to probably be mid-2022.
So no major panic right now. It is an interesting one though.
And I think the signs are good. I mean,
it was always a bit clunky and complex and I think biting the bullet and
actually getting rid of it, instead of trying to fix it,
looks like a really bold decision and probably the right one.
Obviously there's something new replacing it,
which will hopefully be a bunch simpler and more usable,
but we should start to see the first signs of that in Kubernetes 1.22.
So PodSecurityPolicies are deprecated and the
replacement it's not even in early alpha yet.
There's no way we can get through a full episode without at least something on
the security front. And this month's pick goes to Kubesploit from CyberArk.
So this is an offensive security tool that mimics real world attacks.
The idea being right to show you what a real world attack looks and feels like.
So instead of just passive security that identifies vulnerabilities for you,
like, yeah, okay so we've got some, well,
this actually tries to exploit them and show you what can potentially happen.
So you get to see if detections and countermeasures and all of that other stuff
that you've got actually works.
So way more of a full security drill than you typically get from your
traditional more passive security tools.
And last but not least for this month Docker Desktop,
which obviously gives you a test and dev Kubernetes cluster. Well,
it is now GA on Apple Silicon.
So if you're lucky enough to have one of those shiny new high-performance Macs
with the m1 chip, you can rock and roll with Docker Desktop.
And that's the news for this month.
Okay. So for deeper dives this month,
we're going to look at Kubernetes 1.21 and the new Gateway API.
Okay. So first stop look,
my head like it explodes every time there is a new Kubernetes release
and one of the major reasons for this,
is the sheer number of new features and enhancements constantly coming
in through alpha. I think in Kubernetes 1.20, the previous release,
we got 16 new alpha features. Well, this time it's 20.
So seriously, I mean we're in version 1.21,
Kubernetes as a project is just about seven years old and we're still getting
20 new things. Just let that sink in for a second. Anyway, look,
these are my picks from this release CronJobs finally graduates to stable after
being in beta for 13 releases. Now, okay.
As good as that is, it's not really major news. What I like about it though,
is that it's evidence that recent policy changes designed to prevent features
from stagnating in beta forever seem to be having an impact.
So I think in a recent episode,
we mentioned the policy where beta features that don't graduate to stable within
the first nine months will be deprecated. Well,
I see moves like this with CronJobs as evidence that the project is taking that
seriously. Graceful Node Shutdown
is also another good feature that moved into beta.
This one tells the local Kubelet when a node is being shut down,
so giving pods the chance to gracefully terminate. Now,
while this might sound like a small thing,
it's actually huge for certain workloads. And for me,
it's a really strong sign of ongoing Kubernetes maturity.
IPv4 and IPv6 dual stack support,
so where pods and services and things can have both types of addresses,
that went into beta and EndPointSlices, a more efficient version of Endpoints,
that went into GA or stable. Now,
obviously there's a ton more but away from the technology,
999 companies contributed to this version of
Kubernetes. Stick that in your pipe.
It also looks like we're moving to a roadmap of just three major releases per
year. So down one from the usual four,
unfortunately though no signs of a long-term stable program,
which I'm sad about, but that's my take on Kubernetes 1.21.
Okay. Last but not least this month,
almost as soon as Ingress finally goes into GA,
like I think after about 17 releases in beta or something like that at least,
but finally, after graduating to stable,
it's looking like it's about to be superseded seriously. Well,
that's my take anyway. So look,
I think it's important to understand a few things. First up Ingress,
I don't know, it was always a bit of a funny one. In fact,
I think one of the major reasons it's stagnated for so long in beta was because
nobody really knew what to do with it.
Like it never really seemed like quite the right solution.
Plus as well,
while it lingered in beta service meshes rose to prominence,
and they ended up doing a bunch of the stuff that Ingress actually did always
trying to do. Only a lot of the time the service meshes did it better.
It is still kind of important for Kubernetes as a project to have something
native for layer four and layer seven routing or routing yeah?
Off of the back of this,
the project is announcing and developing the new Gateway API.
And the crux is this: Gateway API is a,
from the ground up native Kubernetes Ingress solution.
I almost want to say Ingress 2.0. Only it's not right.
It's a totally different API. But the thing is, when I look at it,
it kind of looks like what I think most of us always wanted Ingress to
be. Ingress networking,
it's really important and choosing the right solution and the right way to do it
is also super important. Kubernetes native Ingress,
like the Ingress API, that's stable.
So don't be worried if you are using that,
but do be aware that better versions are being worked on.
And that's it for this month's Kubernetes This Month. If you liked the show,
be sure to give us a humongous thumbs up. Have a question?
Stick it in the comments. Stay safe,
and I'll be here again next month so don't forget to subscribe.
Same kube time remember, same kube place.