Kubernetes 1.9 moves Workloads APIs to stability
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced version 1.9 of the container orchestration and management platform Kubernetes is expected to be released December 13 with various updates and expanded features. The release follows on the heels of the release of Kubernetes 1.8 in September, making it the fourth release of 2017.
Kubernetes has become a staple of the cloud native community as apparent at this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCone 2017 in Austin, Texas, which consisted of over 4,000 attendees. Leading up to the event, the CNCF conducted a survey to sketch a picture of the cloud native technology landscape, which included the responses of over 550 community members. The survey found that Kubernetes is the most used CNCF project in production at 84%, followed by Prometheus at 48% and Fluentd at 38%.
A theme that ran throughout a number of keynote speakers at this year’s conference was to “keep Kubernetes boring,” in the sense of maintaining the reliability and stability of the open source platform. Modifications to the latest version are made with this goal in mind. Kubernetes 1.9 has moved Workloads APIs to stability as it reaches general availability. As Kubernetes 1.9 goes to beta, it will include DaemonSet, Deployment, ReplicaSet and StatefulSet, which enable users to manage long-running stateless and stateful workloads.
While originally made for Linux systems, Windows is being evaluated for inclusion within Kubernetes proper as its moves to beta-ready. The release is also taking shot at alpha implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI), a cross industry initiative aimed at developing a new standard for cluster-wide volume plugins.
CSI will ease the installation of new volume plugins, allowing third-party storage providers to develop without adding the Kubernetes core codebase. Although, it should be noted the feature must be entered manually and should not be used on production machines. Additional features attached to Kubernetes 1.9 include CRD validation, beta networking IPVS kube-proxy, alpha SIG node hardware accelerator, CoreDNS alpha and alpha IPv6 support.
