The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has announced the upcoming release of the production-grade container scheduling and management solution. Kubernetes 1.9 will be released next week. This is the fourth release of the year.

As part of this release, the Apps Workloads API is now generally available. The Apps Workloads API groups together object such as DaemonSet, Deployment, ReplicaSet, and StatefulSet, which make up the foundation for long running stateless and stateful workloads in Kubernetes. Deployment and ReplicaSet are the two most commonly used and are now stable after a year of use and feedback.

Though Kubernetes was originally developed for Linux systems, support on Windows Server has been moved to beta status so that it can be evaluated for usage.

This release also features an alpha implementation of the Container Storage Interface, which is a cross industry initiative meant to lower the barrier for cloud native storage development. CSI will make it easier to install new volume plugins and allow third-party storage providers to develop without have to add the Kubernetes core codebase.

Other features in this release include CRD validation, beta networking IPVS kube-proxy, alpha SIG node hardware accelerator, CoreDNS alpha, and alpha IPv6 support.

In a recent survey conducted by the CNCF, the organization revealed 61 percent of organizations are evaluating Kubernetes, and 84 percent are using Kubernetes in production.

More information about version 1.9 is available here.