Kubernetes, the helping hand in the automation of containerized applications, has got a new version, Kubernetes 1.8. The new version unfolds many new features along with the updates to some old ones.
“In addition to functional improvements, we’re increasing project-wide focus on maturing process, formalizing architecture, and strengthening Kubernetes’ governance model. The evolution of mature processes clearly signals that sustainability is a driving concern, and helps to ensure that Kubernetes is a viable and thriving project far into the future.”
Let’s have a look at the two major aspects.
Security
In Kubernetes 1.8, the support for RBAC (Role Based Access Control) has been stabilized. RBAC is responsible for enabling the cluster admins with the capability of dynamically defining the roles around the access policy in Kubernetes API. Now, outbound traffic can be filtered easily with redefined network policies.
Workload support
Kubernetes 1.8 promotes the core Workload APIs to beta with the apps/v1beta2 group and version, so as to provide a solid and stable foundation for migrating existing workloads. This will also help in developing the cloud-native applications with ease, making it extremely easy to target Kubernetes natively. If you are working on Big Data workloads and want to leverage Kubernetes in that, the Workloads API now enables native Kubernetes support in Apache Spark.
However, the functionality of extending Kubernetes with user-defined API objects, known as
Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) is still in beta.
Apart from these, the new Kubernetes 1.8 offers – “Volume snapshots, PV resizing, automatic taints, priority pods, kubectl plugins”.
In addition to stabilizing existing functionality, Kubernetes 1.8 offers a number of alpha features that preview new functionality. For a complete list of improvements and enhancements, you can read the
release notes.
Kubernetes 1.8 is available on
GitHub for download. And, the team has shared links for
interactive tutorials as well, for users to get started with Kubernetes.
Being an open-source system for the automation of the containerized applications processing, Kubernetes has been pretty popular among the users. Since Kubernetes 1.8 is the third release this year from the Kubernetes team, it implies that they are serious about their growth and working rigorously to bring out something much better for the users. You can feel their excitement in this statement given in the release blog,
“As the Kubernetes community has grown, our release process has become an amazing demonstration of collaboration in open source software development. Kubernetes continues to gain new users at a rapid clip. This growth creates a positive feedback cycle where more contributors commit code creating a more vibrant ecosystem.”