A Boring Kubernetes Release
Kubernetes release 1.27 is boring, says Xander Grzywinski, a senior product manager at Microsoft.
It’s a stable release, Grzywinski said on this episode of The New Stack Makers from KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam.
“It’s reached a level of stability at this point,” said Grzywinski. “The core feature set has become more fleshed out and fully realized.
The release has 60 total features, Grzywinski said. The features in 1.27 are solid refinements of features that have been around for a while. It’s helping Kubernetes be as stable as it can be.
Examples?
It has a better developer experience, Grzywinski said. Storage primitives and APIs are more stable.
“Storage primitives have been around in Kubernetes for a while, and people have debated whether you should store persistent data on Kubernetes,” he said. “But I think a lot of those primitives and APIs have become more stable. So one of the new ones that have gotten some excitement is the read-write-once access method. So there’s a feature now where you can restrict access of a storage volume. Only one pod at a time can read and write from it. Things like that. That’s like just general refinement that makes the developer experience a little bit better.”
It’s not all boring.
The Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA) is pretty cool, Grzywinski said. It’s in alpha this time, but it will allow pods to scale to larger resources on demand. It will enable users to scale up to a configured level without restarting.
According to its GitHub page, when configured, VPA sets the requests based on usage, “allowing proper scheduling onto nodes so that appropriate resource amount is available for each pod. It will also maintain ratios between limits and requests that were specified in initial containers configuration.”
Efforts will continue to communicate better without surprises.
For example, there’s a new depreciation process that came based on feedback from the community. Grzywinski noted the Dockershim removal that caught a lot of people by surprise in release 1.24.
The New Stack’s Joab Jackson reported in March of 2022 that Dockershim would no longer be supported.
The lesson learned: over-communicate so there are fewer surprises. For example, Grzywinski said a blog is launching dedicated to deprecations and removals that will get pushed out earlier than the regular release blog.
