KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2019 highlights: Microsoft’s Service Mesh Interface, Enhancements to GKE, Virtual Kubelet 1.0, and much more!

The KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2019 is live (May 21- May 23) at the Fira Gran Via exhibition center in Barcelona, Spain. This conference has a huge assemble of announcements for topics including Kubernetes, DevOps, and cloud-native application. There were many exciting announcements from Microsoft, Google, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and more!!

Let’s have a brief overview of each of these announcements.

Microsoft Kubernetes Announcements: Service Mesh Interface(SMI), Visual Studio Code Kubernetes extension 1.0, Virtual Kubelet 1.0, and Helm 3 alpha

Service Mesh Interface(SMI)

Microsoft launched the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) specification, the company’s new community project for collaboration around Service Mesh infrastructure. SMI defines a set of common, portable APIs that provide developers with interoperability across different service mesh technologies including Istio, Linkerd, and Consul Connect.

The Service Mesh Interface provides:

• A standard interface for meshes on Kubernetes
• A basic feature set for the most common mesh use cases
• Flexibility to support new mesh capabilities over time
• Space for the ecosystem to innovate with mesh technology

To know more about the Service Mesh Interface, head over to Microsoft’s official blog.

Visual Studio Code Kubernetes extension 1.0, Virtual Kubelet 1.0, and first alpha of Helm 3

Microsoft released its Visual Studio Code’s open source Kubernetes extension version 1.0. The extension brings native Kubernetes integration to Visual Studio Code, and is fully supported for production management of Kubernetes clusters. Microsoft has also added an extensibility API that makes it possible for anyone to build their own integration experiences on top of Microsoft’s baseline Kubernetes integration.

Microsoft also announced Virtual Kubelet 1.0. Brendan Burns, Kubernetes cofounder and Microsoft distinguished engineer said, “The Virtual Kubelet represents a unique integration of Kubernetes and serverless container technologies, like Azure Container Instances. We developed it and in the context of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where it’s a sandbox project.” He further added, “With 1.0, we’re saying ‘It’s ready.’ We think we’ve done all the work that we need in order for people to take production level dependencies on this project.”

Microsoft also released the first alpha of Helm 3. Helm is the defacto standard for packaging and deploying Kubernetes applications. Helm 3 is simpler, supports all the modern security, identity, and authorization features of today’s Kubernetes. Helm 3 allows users to revisit and simplify Helm’s architecture, due to the growing maturity of Kubernetes identity and security features, like role-based access control (RBAC), and advanced features, such as custom resource definitions (CRDs).

Know more about Helm 3 in detail on Microsoft’s official blog post.

Google announces enhancements to Google Kubernetes Engine; Stackdriver Kubernetes Engine Monitoring ‘generally available’

On the first day of the KubeCon+CloudNative Con 2019, yesterday, Google announced the three release channels for its Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Rapid, Regular and Stable.

Google, in its official blog post states, “Each channel offers different version maturity and freshness, allowing developers to subscribe their cluster to a stream of updates that match risk tolerance and business requirements.”

This new feature will be launched into alpha with the first release in the Rapid channel, which will give developers early access to the latest versions of Kubernetes.

Google also announced the general availability of Stackdriver Kubernetes Engine Monitoring, a tool that gives users a GKE observability (metrics, logs, events, and metadata) all in one place, to help provide faster time-to-resolution for issues, no matter the scale.

To know more about the three release channels and the Stackdriver Kubernetes Engine Monitoring in detail, head over to Google’s official blog post.

Cloud Native Foundation announcements: Announcing Harbor 1.8,  launches a new online course ‘Cloud Native Logging with Fluentd’, Intuit Inc. wins the CNCF End User Award, and Kong Inc. is now a Gold Member

Harbor 1.8

The VMWare team released Harbor 1.8, yesterday, with new features and improvements, including enhanced automation integration, security, monitoring, and cross-registry replication support. Harbor is an open source trusted cloud native registry project that stores, signs, and scans content.

Harbor 1.8 also brings various  other capabilities for both administrators and end users:

• Health check API, which shows detailed status and health of all Harbor components.
• Harbor extends and builds on top of the open source Docker Registry to facilitate registry operations like the pushing and pulling of images. In this release, we upgraded our Docker Registry to version 2.7.1
• Support for defining cron-based scheduled tasks in the Harbor UI. Administrators can now use cron strings to define the schedule of a job. Scan, garbage collection, and replication jobs are all supported.
• API explorer integration. End users can now explore and trigger Harbor’s API via the Swagger UI nested inside Harbor’s UI.
• Enhancement of the Job Service engine to include internal webhook events, additional APIs for job management, and numerous bug fixes to improve the stability of the service.

To know more about this release, read Harbor 1.8 official blogpost.

A new online course on ‘Cloud Native Logging with Fluentd’

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and The Linux Foundation have together designed a new, self-paced and hands-on course Cloud Native Logging with Fluentd. This course will provide users with the necessary skills to deploy Fluentd in a wide range of production settings.

Eduardo Silva, Principal Engineer at Arm Treasure Data, said, “This course will explore the full range of Fluentd features, from installing Fluentd and running it in a container, to using it as a simple log forwarder or a sophisticated log aggregator and processor.” “As we see the Fluentd project growing into a full ecosystem of third party integrations and components, we are thrilled that this course will be offered so more people can realize the benefits it provides”, he further added.

To know more about this course and its benefits in detail, visit the official blogpost.

Intuit Inc. won the CNCF End User Award

At the conference, yesterday, CNCF announced that Intuit Inc. has won the CNCF End User Award in recognition of its contributions to the cloud native ecosystem.

Intuit is an active user, contributor and developer of open source technologies. As a part of its journey to the public cloud, Intuit has advanced the way it leverages cloud native technologies in production, including CNCF projects like Kubernetes and OPA.

To know more about this achievement by Intuit in detail, read the official blog post.

Kong Inc. is now a Gold Member of the CNCF

The CNCF announced that Kong Inc., which provides open source API and service lifecycle management tool has upgraded its membership to Gold. The company backs the Kong project, a cloud native, fast, scalable and distributed microservice abstraction layer. Kong

Kong is focused on building a service control platform that acts as the nervous system for an organization’s modern software architectures by intelligently brokering information across all services.

Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, said, “With their focus on open source and cloud native, Kong is a strong member of the open source community and their membership provides resources for activities like bug bounties and security audits that help our community continue to thrive.”

Head over to CNCF’s official announcement post.

More announcements can be expected from this conference, to stay updated visit KubeCon+CloudNativeCon 2019 official website.

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