The latest version of the container orchestration framework Kubernetes supports GA version of Workloads API, container storage enhancements and Windows support (beta). The Kubernetes team announced the release of version 1.9 last week. This is the fourth and final release this year and also supports the Custom Resource Definition (CRD) validation.
Workloads API GA:
The new release includes the GA version of Workloads API, which is enabled by default. It groups different APIs like DaemonSet, Deployment, ReplicaSet, and StatefulSet together to help with long-running stateless and stateful workloads in Kubernetes. After more than a year of real-world use and feedback, Deployment and ReplicaSet are now stabilized. Also, SIG Apps' special interest group has applied the lessons from the process over the last several release cycles to graduate the DaemonSet and StatefulSet components. The Batch Workloads API (Job and CronJob) is not part of this effort and will have a separate path to GA stability.
Windows Support:
The new release also supports the beta version of running Kubernetes based apps in Windows environments. Kubernetes was originally developed for Linux systems, but the team is seeing more demand for Kubernetes to run Windows workloads. After working on this for the last 12 months, SIG-Windows's pecial interest group is now promoting this feature to beta status, which means Kubernetes can be evaluated for usage on Windows, making it more enterprise ready. Checkout the Getting Started documentation on how to use Windows Server Containers in Kubernetes.
Storage Enhancements:
Kubernetes 1.9 also includes an alpha implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI), which makes installing new volume plugins easier and enables third-party storage providers to develop their solutions without the need to add to the core Kubernetes codebase. Container Storage Interface (CSI) is a cross-industry standards initiative that aims to lower the barrier for cloud native storage development and ensure compatibility. The SIG-Storage group and the CSI Community are collaborating to deliver a single interface for provisioning, attaching, and mounting storage compatible with Kubernetes. This feature is in alpha status which means it must be explicitly enabled and is not recommended for production usage.
Other features available in the new release are:
- Custom Resource Definition (CRD) validation (graduated to beta), which helps CRD authors give clear and immediate feedback for invalid objects.
- SIG Node hardware accelerator moves to alpha, enabling GPUs and consequently machine learning and other high performance workloads.
- CoreDNS alpha makes it possible to install CoreDNS with standard tools.
- IPVS mode for kube-proxy goes beta, providing better scalability and performance for large clusters.
For more details on all the features, checkout the release notes.
Kubernetes 1.9 is available for download on the GitHub website. To get started with Kubernetes, check out these interactive tutorials and the main documentation website.
In a recent survey conducted by CNCF team, they found 61 percent of organizations are evaluating and 83 percent are using Kubernetes in production. The team also organized a Kubernetes 1.9 release roundtable at the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2017 Conference to discuss the features in the new release as well as the roadmap for future Kubernetes releases.
If you are interested in learning more about the Kubernetes 1.9 release, checkout the community resources like Stack Overflow group, Twitter (@Kubernetesio) and Slack channel.