Docker remains a leader in container technology, but Kubernetes is quickly gaining
popularity for container orchestration and management. The open-source
project announced the release of version 1.7, and it is loaded with new features
focused on security, extensibility and other ways for deploying,
scaling and managing containerized applications to be used in the most demanding enterprise
environments.
So, what's new in this release?
Security:
- The Network Policy API
is promoted to stable. Network policy, implemented through a network
plug-in, allows users to set and enforce rules governing which pods can
communicate with each other.
- Node authorizer
and admission control plugin are new additions that restrict kubelet's
access to secrets, pods and other objects based on its node.
- Encryption for Secrets, and other resources in etcd, is now available as alpha.
- Kubelet TLS bootstrapping now supports client and server certificate rotation.
- Audit logs
stored by the API server are now more customizable and extensible with
support for event filtering and webhooks. They also provide richer data
for system audit.
Stateful workloads:
- StatefulSet Updates
is a new beta feature in 1.7, allowing automated updates of stateful
applications such as Kafka, Zookeeper and etcd, using a range of update
strategies including rolling updates.
- StatefulSets also now support faster scaling and startup for applications that do not require ordering through Pod Management Policy. This can be a major performance improvement.
- Local Storage
(alpha) was one of most frequently requested features for stateful
applications. Users can now access local storage volumes through the
standard PVC/PV interface and via StorageClasses in StatefulSets.
- DaemonSets, which create one pod per node already have an update feature, and in 1.7 have added smart rollback and history capability.
- A new StorageOS Volume plugin provides highly-available cluster-wide persistent volumes from local or attached node storage.
Extensibility:
Availability
Kubernetes 1.7 is available for download on GitHub. To get started with Kubernetes, try one of the these interactive tutorials.