Kubernetes 1.14 shipped!
Impossible to miss today is the fact that Kubernetes 1.14 was released. It's immediately available to install via kubeadm.
Many new features and updates in this first 2019 release, most notable is the GA of Windows nodes and in my ballpark, the Local Persistent Volumes and the local provisioner has also been marked GA.
Windows compute node GA
We’ve been kicking the tires on Windows Containers for quite a while. Will Windows Server 2019 and Kubernetes be the big break for containers on Windows? The temperature has been lukewarm at best in what I observe on a daily basis. Sifting through the docs for any persistent storage support I was surprised to see the FlexVolume Plugin being supported and I struggle to find any evidence of Container Storage Interface (CSI) support for Windows compute nodes or is that a given? If it’s not completely obvious, the control plane still requires to be run on Linux. Good news is that networking will simply “work” between Linux and Windows Pods through Flannel and a few others.
Persistent Local Volumes
Anything storage related grep my attention. But why would anyone care about Persistent Local Volumes? I see this as much safer way to provide local storage to end-users than giving access to the hostPath plugin. It allows the cluster-admin to define a directory on the compute nodes that will map a Persistent Volume (PV) to a directory within the defined root directory, dynamically provision through a StorageClass using the accompanying local provisioner. Much safer and more secure. DaemonSets and StatefulSets with distributed databases and filesystems is the most obvious use case. However, external storage vendors without any sophisticated integration with K8s can simply mount their volumes static and still provide storage for the workload types that doesn’t rely on high-availability storage. Added bonus is that it will scale in terms of PV and Persistent Volume Claims (PVC) count far beyond what any external storage, or Software-defined Storage (SDS) solution for that matter, as a PV simply maps to a directory, no more, no less.
kubectl revamped docs and logo
A new mascot also snuck in, we have an octopus named "kubee-cuddle" featured in the revamped kubecuddle documentation: https://kubectl.docs.kubernetes.io/
Read the release notes in its entirety here.
Update!
I took the time to validate the HPE Nimble Kube Storage Controller with Kubernetes 1.14. No surprises here!