Hello, Cloud Gurus and welcome to 2021. I'm Nigel Poulton,
the author of The Kubernetes book and this is Kubernetes This Month.
The show that keeps you up to date with the major points of interest in the
Kubernetes unit.
December saw the third and final release of Kubernetes for 2020,
and it was a huge one.
So we'll take a closer look at that in the deeper dive section.
Congratulations to everyone involved with Etcd as it finally graduated the CNCF.
Now as usual, this signals maturity of the project,
widespread adoption and solid project governance.
All of which has good stuff considering 99 or whatever percent of
kubernetes cost is depend on it.
Congratulations as well to the Istio team for their final release of 2020.
Istio 1.8 ships with support for installation via Helm 3 and
easy installation for meshes that span multiple Kubernetes clusters,
plus a bunch more. Mirantis renames Docker Enterprise.
Now it seems the cool thing for every vendor to have something with Kubernetes
Engine in the title or Kubernetes Service.
While not wanting to be left out Mirantis renamed Docker Enterprise,
Mirantis Kubernetes Engine or MKE.
There was also a ton of hype. And if I'm being honest,
a ton of fear and dread over the announcement that Kubernetes is deprecating
support for Docker. We'll go more into that in the deeper dive section as well.
And last but not least this month,
Anthos continues it's March forward with bare metal support going GA.
And that wraps the major announcements for the month.
Okay. Yeah, like we said,
Kubernetes 1.20 was the final release of 2020.
And it was huge. In fact,
maybe too huge if such a thing as possible.
So there were 42 and enhancement's in total with 15 going
into GA signaling stability,
but 16 shiny new alpha features showing absolute
zero let-up in the innovation space.
So Kubernetes clearly has no intention of taking it easy anytime soon.
Drilling into the features I'm loving the fact that volume snapshots have gone
GA this makes Kubernetes that simple and standardized API layer that
hides the complexity of enterprise storage systems below.
So a standard way to trigger and manage snaps,
no matter what the storage is behind the scenes,
ultimately bringing enterprise storage features to Kubernetes apps as
well.
The cube CTL debug command went into beta and on the alpha
front,
I am liking the rebuild of the IPV4 and IPV 6 combined
stack for service objects that need an IP V4 and an IP
V6 Cluster IP. Now look, there's plenty more, but those are my pick.
So Kubernetes 1.20 was a biggie like we just said,
but arguably the news that caused the most excitement and confusion was the
deprecation of the Docker shim. So to explain this,
let me just wind the clock back a bit.
When Kubernetes was the new kid on the block,
it needed something to run containers and it chose Docker,
and everything was good, but then two things happened.
Docker grew and Kubernetes made that container runtime layer plugable.
Now on the Dockers growing side,
Docker ended up doing way more than Kubernetes needed and carrying that extra
baggage was just a burden for Kubernetes.
Also Kubernetes made the layer that Docker worked at plugable,
but Docker never supported that plug-in layer. It needed a shim.
So Docker got too big and it needed a shim, not ideal.
Anyway, as of Kubernetes 1.20,
the Docker shim is being deprecated.
Now look it all still works for now and support won't actually be pulled until a
later release,
but if you're running Docker on your cluster nodes,
you're going to start getting deprecation warnings. But you know what,
even in the future, when support actually is ended,
not much is really going to change. I mean,
you'll still be able to develop and build your container images with Docker and
they'll continue to run fine on Kubernetes.
So even though Kubernetes is dropping support for Docker assets,
container runtime layer Docker itself will remain. And you know what?
It'll probably continue to be the leading tool for developing and building
container images and Kubernetes will remain the leading tool for deploying them.
And that's it for this month. If you liked the show,
be sure to give it a big thumbs up. If you've got a question,
add it into the comments, stay safe.
Don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you again next month. Same kube time,
same kube place.