Open Source Summit Prague: What’s New in Kubernetes 1.8

This session is by Igor Dvoretsky, Developer Advocate for the CNCF. I figured people are always interested in what’s new in the hottest project on GitHub, so I decided to attend this session. I decided to give live blogging a try 🙂

Igor first mentioned that he is a member of the release team for 1.8. First he went into a description of the release process – four times per year. Every quarter. Release 1.8 is driven by a team of 11 roles and 14 contributors. The release team is elected before the release is planned.

Then he started digging into the ecosystem. The SIG Architecture group was established and the Enhanced Governance model has been established. The Steering Committee has been elected. The Kubernetes project is a member of the CNCF but they do not mandate a governance model.

The CNCF has established the Certified Kubernetes Conformance program. There is a new mark and it is more flexible. Also, they established a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider program. They also released the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. It takes 3-4 hours to complete the test.

Digging into end users, 54% of Fortune 100 companies are running Kubernetes.

The Release

This is the biggest release ever. There are 40 new features. These are made up of Alpha, Beta, and Stable. Alpha are targeted for release in 2 or 3 releases. Beta brings a stable API, but things can still break. Stable features are expected to be available in Kubernetes from every vendor.

Contributors

  • 2500 pull requests
  • 2000+ commits
  • Approximately 400 committees

Most notable features are around Security, Workloads and Extensibility. Stable core but many extensions.

Security

  • Network Policy – between pods and objects. Filtering outbound traffic in CIDR notation.
  • RBAC – Allows multi-tenancy specified by the cluster administrator

Workloads

  • Workload controllers API – consistency between DaemonSet, ReplicaSets, StatefulSets, etc
  • Enhanced runtimes – CRI-O and containerd
  • Extension to support new compute resources. Alpha feature, but useful for video cards, Asics, FPGAs, etc

Extensibility

  • FlexVolumes – framework for storage plugins. He didn’t give a lot of meaty detail
  • CustomResourceDefinitions – Stabilization continues. Allow you to build and manage your own API extensnions. Good for vendors or advanced users.

The full release notes can be found on GitHub. Then he went into insights on Kubernetes 1.9. End of the year release, less time, so focusing on stability.

  • Core Stability
  • Extensibility
  • Workloads

He invited people to contribute. If you want to contribute, join us at https://kubernetes.io

He then closed the presentation and started answering questions.

Overall, I think it was a great session. It had just the right level of detail to keep people engaged, but allowed those not intimate with the day to day work to keep up and follow.

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