Top 3 most important updates in Kubernetes 1.24

We’re almost halfway through the year already, and it feels like the Kubernetes news keeps on coming! In this post, we’ll take a look at the three most notable features in the recently released Kubernetes 1.24 - including the biggest feature removal in Kubernetes history. We’ll also review the highlights of KubeCon Europe for 2022, and discuss a new Docker acquisition.

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The biggest news around Kubernetes this month is the release of Kubernetes 1.24.

It's the first release of 2022, and is codenamed “Stargazer” — due to the thousand-plus companies and individuals that contributed to the latest version. Magic!

This new release ships with 46 enhancements. 14 of those are features graduating to stable, 15 are moving to beta, and there are 13 shiny new alpha features. However, grabbing the headlines in this release is definitely the removal of the Dockershim or Docker runtime. 

Now I get it; it feels like we've been talking about this forever, but it is probably the biggest feature removal in the history of Kubernetes, and it has massive potential to do damage. 

But the good news is it's still early days. The new version has been released, but not many folks are going to be using it yet. So for me, the potential for disruption still exists and will do for at least the next 6-12 months.

You can find the link to the guide for getting ready here. Hopefully, this is the last time we'll need it. 

Something else of interest is that going forward; new beta APIs will be off by default. Now, this is the opposite of before, where they were on by default which was super useful — but almost too useful. People found themselves getting hooked without fully realizing they were beta. 

So as of 1.24, new beta APIs will be off by default, but anything that was already beta in previous releases and already enabled, they'll stay turned on. So for net new beta stuff, like the 15 enhancements in 1.24, if you wanna use them, you gotta enable them by hand. 

Phew!

Now last 1.24 highlight from me.

As a former storage guy and a person who thinks feature-rich storage in Kubernetes is a big deal for key workloads, I'm excited that storage capacity tracking and volume expansion are now stable features.

Volume expansion (which has been beta since 1.11— love that) lets you directly edit an existing PVC and specify a new bigger size. And it's gotta be bigger. There's no making them smaller. It requires support from the CSI driver and back-end storage system.

The other one was capacity tracking. This exposes capacity info so the scheduler can pick appropriate nodes for Pods that need storage. Good stuff, believe me.

Huge props to James Laverack and the rest of the release team for getting this release over the line! 

We had our second in-person KubeCon since the pandemic, and it was our first one back in Europe. 

Now there was some simmering tension around the way the CNCF handled the face mask policy. And if you paid attention, you could definitely feel it. But I think for about 90% of people there, they wouldn't have even noticed. 

Anyway, the event was good, and the general feeling was that there was a lot more attendee footfall than in LA 6 months earlier. That said, though, I'm not sure it was a rip-roaring success. I dunno; it just felt a little subdued. 

It all started with the usual day zero events: mini-conferences like GitOpsCon, Cloud Native SecurityCon, Prometheus Day, eBPF Day, and a bunch more. Plus a ton of workshops. Loads of them were sold out, but not all. 

After that, it was three days of sessions, hallway tracks, briefings, booths, and even beaches and a few parties. 

I think if there were any takeaway themes from being boots-on-the-ground, it was an uptick in hybrid and multi-cloud tools and offerings. Unsurprisingly, the security folks were there in force. There's also a demand for 101 beginner content. And it feels like every conference we get more and more IT and operations people attending. 

And that was KubeCon Europe. It was great to be back.

Check out ACG's free courses for the month of January, which includes our Designing Applications for Kubernetes course. It's free this month only. No credit card needed, no joking!

Hot off the heels of its most recent round of funding, Docker has acquired Tilt, which is basically a tool or project for making microservices development easier.

Now from 40K feet, it seems like a good move as Docker is all about making developers' lives easier. However, I thought the blog article announcing the move was kinda funny. It really felt like they were saying, "yeah, there's potential for great synergies here," but it lacked a clear path for how the two will actually integrate. I mean, the blog finished up saying pretty much, "we're going to put our heads together and figure out where Docker and Tilt can integrate." What!?

I was really interested to see Spot Pods go GA on GKE Autopilot clusters. 

They're basically Pods, running on Spot instances, and — as with most things Spot — they're cheap, but they can be evicted without warning. So they’re not suitable for all workloads. But they’re most definitely a cool feature in the ever-improving and maturing GKE ecosystem. 

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That’s it for this month’s edition of Kubernetes this month. Stay safe, and I’ll see you all again next month — same Kube time, same Kube place.

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