The open source project for deploying, scaling and managing containerized applications is getting a number of new functional improvements in its latest release. Kubernetes 1.8 is the third release of the year, and features security enhancements, workload support and extensibility improvements.
In addition, the team says the release includes an increased “project-wide focus on maturing process, formalizing architecture, and strengthening Kubernetes’ governance model.”
“The momentum within the community continues to grow as organizations embrace Kubernetes as the leading platform for container orchestration, and this release continues the Kubernetes community’s commitment to security and extensibility with work on stabilizing existing features, even as new ones are added,” Eric Chiang, engineer at CoreOS, wrote in a post.
Security improvements includes stable support for role-based access control (RBAC) and a beta version of the Transport Layer Security certificate rotation for more secure cluster operations. RBAC is designed to enable cluster admins to define roles and enforce access policies through the Kubernetes API.
The core Workload APIs have been updated to beta with current versions of Deployment, DaemonSet, ReplicaSet, and StatefulSet. “The Workloads APIs provide a stable foundation for migrating existing workloads to Kubernetes as well as developing cloud native applications that target Kubernetes natively,” the Kubernetes team wrote.
Other features of the release include: advanced auditing, alpha support for CRD schema validation, service automation, and cluster stability.
According to the team, Kubernetes 1.8 is just a taste of what is to come. Upcoming features include volume snapshots, PV resizing and automatic taints.
Kubernetes is a community effort with partners such as IBM, CoreOS, Red Hat, Rancher Labs, and more. “Like anything in open source, the more people that work on the problem from different perspectives, the better the result,” Red Hat wrote in a blog.
