Hello Cloud Gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton and welcome to Kubernetes This Month.
Now first and foremost of course I hope that everyone is safe and well.
However, we'll start the show with our usual Kubernetes news Roundup.
We'll pick a couple of those things that look interesting and we'll dive a bit
deeper.
Then we'll round this show out with a chance for you to win a goody bag with our
Guru of the Month section,
so grab a comfy seat and get ready to enjoy.
First up in the news Kubernetes 1.18 is here and it's got a strong stability and
maturity theme. Again, that's becoming part for the course these days. Well,
we'll take a closer look in the deeper dive section.
Out into the ecosystem though and Rancher Labs has raised another 40 million in
a series D round of funding bringing total funding to around 95 million.
Now,
the most recent round includes several former investors plus Telstra Australia's
largest telco as the lead for the round, or at least their investment arm. Yeah.
Either way though,
they obviously like what they see with Rancher as they're also customers.
Sticking with Rancher Labs they just released fleet as an open source project
for managing fleets Kubernetes clusters.
So in a very general way, right,
kind of treating Kubernetes clusters like pods kind of almost.
Anyway,
this is yet another interesting project from Rancher who just seemed to have
this deep culture of bringing very cool projects to the ecosystem.
Things like K3S and the likes.
Moving away from Rancher to Docker after having sold their enterprise business
to Mirantis and promising to focus on developers,
Docker Inc just announced that they'll be focusing on Docker Desktop and Docker
Hub to make it easier for developers to get from code all the way to the cloud.
Plus they publish their roadmap on GitHub, which is pretty cool.
It's still recently announced version 1.5 which is a pretty big release and
we'll look more at that in a minute. Now some of you might remember,
we said goodbye to Containership last year as they folded the business. Well,
it seems Hitachi Vantara has acquired their IP and assets.
So Hitachi Vantara is basically Hitachi data systems or HDS,
the data storage subsidiary of Hitachi in Japan.
And they're doing what a lot of traditional enterprise vendors like NetApp and
VMware are doing that on the acquisition trail,
looking for ways to get in on the Kubernetes game.
So it looks like they've acquired the tech behind the Containership Kubernetes
Engine. Now speaking of enterprise vendors and Kubernetes platforms,
HPE, the enterprise edition of Hewlett Packard announced general availability of
their own Kubernetes platform called the HP container platform.
VMware V vSphere 7 is also here,
which is VMware's biggest rearchitecture of the vSphere platform to date an all
to make containerized workloads first class citizens.
So vSphere 7 loves containers and Kubernetes just as much as it loves VMs.
And it's trying to make all of this as simple as possible for VM admins.
Now last but not least,
in this relatively slow month for Kubernetes news Kubeflow,
Google solution for deploying machine learning workloads to Kubernetes that got
a 1.0 Release.
Okay.
And this month's deeper dive section will look a bit closer at Kubernetes 1.18
STO 1.5 And Dockers new focus. So like I said,
Kubernetes 1.18 hit the streets and it's got that familiar feel of more maturity
and more stability. In fact,
the blog that accompanied the release on the Kubernetes website referred to this
version as fit and finish suggesting to me an improved customer experience.
And you can see why, right?
I mean there are 15 features or enhancements that are moving to stable.
Well for me, three things stand out.
One the KubeCTL debug command is coming and I for one, can't wait.
Right? So as someone who've built in crashes,
a lot of clusters for testing purposes and dedicated KubeCTL debug command
acting a hope, right as a single place for deep and powerful troubleshooting.
It just can't come soon enough. Now, it's currently an alpha,
so it's really early and I'm not sure we even really know what it looked like
when it finally goes GA. But please, Oh,
please make it more than just a beefed up KubeCTL exec.
Anyway.
The second thing that caught my eye was Topology Manager going into beta.
Now if you don't know,
just think of Topology Manager as like souped up scheduling and resource
allocation, but all joined up and working together with as well.
Awareness of critical hardware accelerations like SRIO V and a bunch more.
The third thing that caught my eye was more on the be aware or the warning
front, right 1.18 includes some pretty major deprecations.
Obviously check the docks for the full list,
but 1.18 will no longer serve anything from the apps.
V1 beta 1 and the apps V1 beta 2 API APIs.
So start getting all of your manifests and the likes on to apps V1 okay,
so ISTIO 1.5 This is a pretty big release from ISTIO on a few fronts, right?
Yeah,
it's probably got the most changes we've seen in a pump release for quite some
time, but as well as lots of changes. Some of them have pretty huge ones.
Now I'm going to start with Istio D.
so the whole Istio control plane is being consolidated into a single binary
called ISTIO D to make it easier for operations and the likes to deploy and
troubleshoot.
Now they're not changing the way that you interact with the API and of course
they're not changing how the mesh works or anything like that.
This is purely to make deploying and troubleshooting installs and the likes much
easier though I'm sure this is not wasted on you right.
A major cloud native application is rearchitecting itself to be more monolithic
in the name of simplification.
So if there was ever proof needed that microservices can sometimes make life
harder. This is it. On the functionality front,
they're implementing web assembly to merge that own mixer based extensibility
model with Envoy extensibility. So going forward, okay,
in SDL,
all extensibility is going to come under a single roof of web assembly,
big tech there for simplification.
They're also making it easier to deploy ISTIO from the command line through some
major improvements to ISTIO CTL.
Last but not least on this month's deeper dive section,
Docker follows through on its promise to become more developer focused.
Now that it's sold it's enterprise business.
So Docker has identified difficulties in getting from code all the way to the
cloud and it wants to make that easier for us.
So in the upcoming months we should expect to see major changes and improvements
to Docker Desktop as well as Docker Hub. Now on the Docker hope front,
this scares me a bit, okay. Because I love Docker hub and its current format,
but Docker hub is slated to become way more than just a registry.
My guess. Okay. Is more like Docker trusted registry if you'd ever use that.
Okay,
so things like image vulnerability scanning plus a bunch of pipeline stuff to
help us get our code and images through complex workflows and deployed to the
cloud.
Now I wish them luck with this and I hope that they can nail it without straying
from what is already a great tool. Well on the Docker desktop front,
we should expect features that make it easier to onboard new developers to your
teams and to integrate those new developers to your workflows.
Plus a bunch of team collaboration stuff.
And if you want to know the specifics of what's coming,
they've published their roadmap and that gurus wraps up the deep dive section
for this month. Okay.
Guru of the month.
Last month I asked which technology current versions of Kubernetes is used to
get from service IPS to pod IPS.
And the answer was IPVs or IP virtual server. And honestly,
we got some great answers including an absolute belter from SuperCAT.
But the winner this month is Mohammed Shoaib Ul Haque.
Now I probably didn't pronounce that right, but you know what?
What's important is that Mohammed got the answer correct. In fact,
he gave a great answer.
So Mohammed is a software engineer from Bangalore in India and Muhammad mate,
you'll be getting a goodie bag in the post.
And as always a huge thanks to everyone else who gave answers.
I love reading them. And you know what?
I often learn a thing or two from your answers, so that's cool. Anyway,
this month's question is in the forum link below.
Stay safe and I'll see you next month. Same Kube time. Same Kube place.