KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 Highlights: Helm 3.0 release, CodeReady Workspaces 2.0, and more!

Update: On November 26, the OpenFaaS community released a post including a few of its highlights at KubeCon, San Diego. The post also includes a few highlights from OpenFaaS Cloud, Flux from Weaveworks, Okteto, Dive from Buoyant and k3s going GA.

The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019 held at San Diego, North America from 18 - 21 November, witnessed over 12,000 attendees to discuss and improve their education and advancement about containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native.

The conference was home to many major announcements including the release of Helm 3.0, Red Hat’s CodeReady Workspaces 2.0, GA of Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and many more.

Major highlights at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019

General availability of Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

IBM cloud announced that the managed Istio on its cloud Kubernetes service is generally available. This service provides a seamless installation of Istio, automatic updates, lifecycle management of Istio control plane components, and integration with platform logging and monitoring tools. With managed Istio, a user’s service mesh is tuned for optimal performance in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

Istio is a service mesh that it is able to provide its features without developers having to make any modifications to their applications. The Istio installation is tuned to perform optimally on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and is pre-configured to work out of the box with IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA and IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig.

Red Hat announces CodeReady Workspaces 2.0

CodeReady Workspaces 2.0 helps developers to build applications and services similar to the production environment, i.e all apps run on Red Hat OpenShift. A few new services and tools in the CodeReady Workspaces 2.0 include:

Air-gapped installs: These enable CodeReady Workspaces to be downloaded, scanned and moved into more secure environments when access to the public internet is limited or unavailable. It doesn’t "call back" to public internet services.

An updated user interface: This brings an improved desktop-like experience to developers.

Support for VSCode extensions: This gives developers access to thousands of IDE extensions.

Devfile: A sharable workspace configuration that specifies everything a developer needs to work, including repositories, runtimes, build tools and IDE plugins, and is stored and versioned with the code in Git.

Production consistent containers for developers: This clones the sources in where needed and adds development tools (such as debuggers, language servers, unit test tools, build tools) as sidecar containers so that the running application container mirrors production.

Brad Micklea, vice president of Developer Tools, Developer Programs, and Advocacy, Red Hat, said, “Red Hat is working to make developing in cloud native environments easier offering the features developers need without requiring deep container knowledge. Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2 is well-suited for security-sensitive environments and those organizations that work with consultants and offshore development teams.”

To know more about CodeReady Workspaces 2.0, read the press release on the Red Hat official blog.

Helm 3.0 released

Built upon the success of Helm 2, the internal implementation of Helm 3 has changed considerably from Helm 2. The most apparent change in Helm 3.0 is the removal of Tiller.

A rich set of new features have been added as a result of the community’s input and requirements. A few features include:

Improved Upgrade strategy: Helm 3 uses 3-way strategic merge patches

Secrets as the default storage driver

Go import path changes

Validating Chart Values with JSONSchema

Some features have been deprecated or refactored in ways that make them incompatible with Helm 2. Some new experimental features have also been introduced, including OCI support. Also, the Helm Go SDK has been refactored for general use. The goal is to share and re-use code open sourced with the broader Go community.

To know more about Helm 3.0 in detail, read the official blog post.

AWS, Intuit and WeaveWorks Collaborate on Argo Flux

Recently, Weaveworks announced a partnership with Intuit to create Argo Flux, a major open-source project to drive GitOps application delivery for Kubernetes via an industry-wide community. Argo Flux combines the Argo CD project led by Intuit with the Flux CD project driven by Weaveworks, two well known open source tools with strong community support.

At KubeCon, AWS announced that it is integrating the GitOps tooling based on Argo Flux in Elastic Kubernetes Service and Flagger for AWS App Mesh.

The collaboration resulted in a new project called GitOps Engine to simplify application deployment in Kubernetes. The GitOps Engine will be responsible for the following functionality:

Access to Git repositories

Kubernetes resource cache

Manifest Generation

Resources reconciliation

Sync Planning

To know more about this collaboration in detail, read the GitOps Engine page on GitHub.

Grafana Labs announces general availability of Loki 1.0

Grafana Labs, an open source analytics and monitoring solution provider, announced that Loki version 1.0 is generally available for production use. Loki is an open source logging platform that provides developers with an easy-to-use, highly efficient and cost-effective approach to log aggregation.

With Loki 1.0, users can instantaneously switch between metrics and logs, preserving context and reducing MTTR. By storing compressed, unstructured logs and only indexing metadata, Loki is cost-effective and simple to operate by design. It includes a set of components that can be composed into a fully-featured logging stack. Grafana Cloud offers a high-performance, hosted Loki service that allows users to store all logs together in a single place with usage-based pricing.

Read about Loki 1.0 on GitHub to know more in detail.