Kubernetes 1.10: Stabilizing Storage, Security, and Networking

Editor's note: today's post is by the 1.10 Release Team

We’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.10, our first release of 2018!

Today’s release continues to advance maturity, extensibility, and pluggability of Kubernetes. This newest version stabilizes features in 3 key areas, including storage, security, and networking. Notable additions in this release include the introduction of external kubectl credential providers (alpha), the ability to switch DNS service to CoreDNS at install time (beta), and the move of Container Storage Interface (CSI) and persistent local volumes to beta.

Let’s dive into the key features of this release:

Storage - CSI and Local Storage move to beta

This is an impactful release for the Storage Special Interest Group (SIG), marking the culmination of their work on multiple features. The Kubernetes implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) moves to beta in this release: installing new volume plugins is now as easy as deploying a pod. This in turn enables third-party storage providers to develop their solutions independently outside of the core Kubernetes codebase. This continues the thread of extensibility within the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Durable (non-shared) local storage management progressed to beta in this release, making locally attached (non-network attached) storage available as a persistent volume source. This means higher performance and lower cost for distributed file systems and databases.

This release also includes many updates to Persistent Volumes. Kubernetes can automatically prevent deletion of Persistent Volume Claims that are in use by a pod (beta) and prevent deletion of a Persistent Volume that is bound to a Persistent Volume Claim (beta). This helps ensure that storage API objects are deleted in the correct order.

Security - External credential providers (alpha)

Kubernetes, which is already highly extensible, gains another extension point in 1.10 with external kubectl credential providers (alpha). Cloud providers, vendors, and other platform developers can now release binary plugins to handle authentication for specific cloud-provider IAM services, or that integrate with in-house authentication systems that aren’t supported in-tree, such as Active Directory. This complements the Cloud Controller Manager feature added in 1.9.

Networking - CoreDNS as a DNS provider (beta)

The ability to switch the DNS service to CoreDNS at install time is now in beta. CoreDNS has fewer moving parts: it’s a single executable and a single process, and supports additional use cases.

Each Special Interest Group (SIG) within the community continues to deliver the most-requested enhancements, fixes, and functionality for their respective specialty areas. For a complete list of inclusions by SIG, please visit the release notes.

Availability

Kubernetes 1.10 is available for download on GitHub. To get started with Kubernetes, check out these interactive tutorials.

2 Day Features Blog Series

If you’re interested in exploring these features more in depth, check back next week for our 2 Days of Kubernetes series where we’ll highlight detailed walkthroughs of the following features:

Day 1 - Container Storage Interface (CSI) for Kubernetes going Beta Day 2 - Local Persistent Volumes for Kubernetes going Beta

Release team

This release is made possible through the effort of hundreds of individuals who contributed both technical and non-technical content. Special thanks to the release team led by Jaice Singer DuMars, Kubernetes Ambassador for Microsoft. The 10 individuals on the release team coordinate many aspects of the release, from documentation to testing, validation, and feature completeness.

As the Kubernetes community has grown, our release process represents 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.

Project Velocity

The CNCF has continued refining an ambitious project to visualize the myriad contributions that go into the project. K8s DevStats illustrates the breakdown of contributions from major company contributors, as well as an impressive set of preconfigured reports on everything from individual contributors to pull request lifecycle times. Thanks to increased automation, issue count at the end of the release was only slightly higher than it was at the beginning. This marks a major shift toward issue manageability. With 75,000+ comments, Kubernetes remains one of the most actively discussed projects on GitHub.

User Highlights

According to a recent CNCF survey, more than 49% of Asia-based respondents use Kubernetes in production, with another 49% evaluating it for use in production. Established, global organizations are using Kubernetes in production at massive scale. Recently published user stories from the community include:

1. Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, moved its internal IT department’s applications to run on Kubernetes. This resulted in the global deployment cycles decreasing from a week to minutes, and the efficiency of application delivery improved by tenfold.
2. Jinjiang Travel International, one of the top 5 largest OTA and hotel companies, use Kubernetes to speed up their software release velocity from hours to just minutes. Additionally, they leverage Kubernetes to increase the scalability and availability of their online workloads.
3. Haufe Group, the Germany-based media and software company, utilized Kubernetes to deliver a new release in half an hour instead of days. The company is also able to scale down to around half the capacity at night, saving 30 percent on hardware costs.
4. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, was able to move quickly using Kubernetes and built an investor research web app from inception to delivery in under 100 days. Is Kubernetes helping your team? Share your story with the community.

Ecosystem Updates

1. The CNCF is expanding its certification offerings to include a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer exam. The CKAD exam certifies an individual's ability to design, build, configure, and expose cloud native applications for Kubernetes. The CNCF is looking for beta testers for this new program. More information can be found here.
2. Kubernetes documentation now features user journeys: specific pathways for learning based on who readers are and what readers want to do. Learning Kubernetes is easier than ever for beginners, and more experienced users can find task journeys specific to cluster admins and application developers.
3. CNCF also offers online training that teaches the skills needed to create and configure a real-world Kubernetes cluster.

KubeCon

The world’s largest Kubernetes gathering, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is coming to Copenhagen from May 2-4, 2018 and will feature technical sessions, case studies, developer deep dives, salons and more! Check out the schedule of speakers and register today!

Webinar

Join members of the Kubernetes 1.10 release team on April 10th at 10am PDT to learn about the major features in this release including Local Persistent Volumes and the Container Storage Interface (CSI). Register here.

Get Involved

The simplest way to get involved with Kubernetes is by joining one of the many Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that align with your interests. Have something you’d like to broadcast to the Kubernetes community? Share your voice at our weekly community meeting, and through the channels below.

Thank you for your continued feedback and support.

1. Post questions (or answer questions) on Stack Overflow
2. Join the community portal for advocates on K8sPort
3. Follow us on Twitter @Kubernetesio for latest updates
4. Chat with the community on Slack
5. Share your Kubernetes story.

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