What To Expect From Kubernetes 1.31
Kubernetes v1.31 is scheduled to arrive on planet Earth on August 13, 2024. The Kubernetes release team has been fairly solid about the release date at the time of writing, but it could swing by a week, here or there.
By way of a reminder, the Kubernetes release team maintains release branches for the most recent three minor releases in any given time window. Kubernetes versions are logically labeled under the numerical naming convention x.y.z, where x is the major version, y is the minor version and z is the patch version.
How the K8S Market Moves
Noting that the community releases new Kubernetes minor versions regularly throughout the year, AWS solution architect Sai Vennam says that Amazon EKS follows the upstream release and deprecation cycle for minor versions. As new Kubernetes versions become available, his team recommends users proactively update clusters to use the latest available version.
“A minor version is under standard support in Amazon EKS for the first 14 months after it’s released. Once a version is past the end of the standard support date, it automatically enters extended support for the next 12 months,” said Vennam, clearly aware of the circularity and rapidity of Kubernetes release cadence and what it means for live production environment deployments.
The official timing from the community states that Kubernetes releases currently happen three times per year, and the lifecycle of a particular enhancement can be considered as comprising three main phases:
- Enhancement Definition
- Implementation
- Stabilization
“In reality, this is an open source and agile project, with feature planning and implementation happening at all times. Given the project scale and globally distributed developer base, it is critical to project velocity to not rely on a trailing stabilization phase and rather have continuous integration testing which ensures the project is always stable so that individual commits can be flagged as having broken something,” explains the Kubernetes project pages.
What to Expect in K8S v1.31
Clearly, by now, cloud engineering-focused software developers will have already been tracking the release notes and collateral available on release v1.31 on GitHub.
Angelos Kolaitis, Kubernetes v1.31 release team lead has noted the need for a more globally connected approach to team development and said that “One of the things we will be working to improve this cycle will be the APAC-friendly release team weekly meetings. Past members of the release team will remember that these are often low in attendance and interest. We would like to rejuvenate those, such that people in APAC time zones have more chances and opportunities to participate and engage with the release process. Expect to hear more news on this throughout the release cycle.”
While there is much conjecture-based commentary surrounding the enhancement lifecycle and release schedule of Kubernetes, the only real way to know what’s happening is to hear it from a member of the Kubernetes Release Team.
“Kubernetes is built, released and governed by a community of mostly unpaid volunteers across the globe. It’s this diverse community of contributors that allows us to continue to grow as rapidly as we have. Each Kubernetes release is unique, with no single overarching theme as far as features go. Kubernetes v1.31 is no exception, with a wide variety of features graduating to Stable or Beta and net new Alpha features. You’ll see everything from changes to Pod Disruption Budgets and dynamic cardinality enforcement graduating to Stable, to new Alpha features like field and label selectors being available as authorization attributes. That said, it’s a massive undertaking year round. The more we grow, the more help we need throughout the project in both technical and non-technical roles,” said Kat Cosgrove, lead open source advocate at Dell.
In terms of wider opinions here Nigel Douglas, senior developer advocate at Sysdig says that one addition to look out for is the new custom profile option for the Kubectl Debug command.
“This helps you debug applications built in shell-less base images. By allowing the mounting of data volumes and other resources within the debug container, you can support your team around adopting more secure, shell-less base images without sacrificing debugging capabilities,” said Douglas.
Kubernetes Goes Cloud-Neutral
“The biggest change in version 1.31 is around how Kubernetes is being made into a more cloud-neutral platform rather than being tied to specific cloud platforms with additional code. This will cut out some of the code that is in previous versions so that users can use their applications on Kubernetes regardless of the cloud it is running on. The changes in v 1.31 should have a minimal impact or disruption for existing users,” added the Sysdig developer leader.
Sysdig also points to the deprecation notice and notes the following:
“Probably the most exciting advancement in v.1.31 is the removal of all in-tree integrations with cloud providers. Since v.1.26 there has been a large push to help Kubernetes truly become a vendor-neutral platform. This Externalization [KEP-2395] process will successfully remove all cloud provider-specific code from the k8s.io/kubernetes repository with minimal disruption to end users and developers.”
Vanilla K8S, Delicious
Across the pond in the United Kingdom, the arrival of Kubernetes is being met with anticipation and “open” arms – pun quite definitely intended. CEO of OpenUK (an organization devoted to promoting the use of open technologies across private and public sector bodies) Amanda Brock eyes another welcome avenue to progress without the specter of proprietary lock-in.
“The Kubernetes team’s removal of some cloud-provider-specific code enables ‘vanilla’ K8S to be run across multiple cloud providers without lock-in to a specific cloud provider. Users can operate infrastructure and data in a way that’s more aligned to the principles of open source and builds critical user flexibility,” said Brock.
She further notes her “suspicion” that antitrust and competition authorities will be as interested to see this shift as the users being liberated. In reality, she says, it’s a direction of travel that’s unsurprising along with recent removals of egress fees and one that’s been worked on since 2017.
Also in the UK, CEO of Kubernetes platform development cloud services provider Civo Mark Boost notes – with the recent CrowdStrike debacle still ringing in our ears – that there has been a certain tightening effect applied.
“In Kubernetes v1.30, a security update ensured that read-only volume mounts are now fully recursive, addressing a previous issue where some sub-mounts remained writeable. This feature, initially in alpha, has been promoted to beta in v1.31, highlighting the ongoing focus on security improvements in Kubernetes. This enhancement helps reinforce trust in the Kubernetes ecosystem,” clarified Boost.
How to Get Involved
Developers interested in getting their own updates and extensions into the Kubernetes universe can access the Kubernetes enhancements repository, which provides information about Kubernetes releases, as well as feature tracking and backlogs. The community repository hosts all information about building Kubernetes from source code onward to how to contribute code and documentation and who to contact for more information.
