News

Kubernetes Update: Open Source Developers Improve Networking, Storage and More

• By David Ramel
• June 28, 2018

The open source Kubernetes container orchestration project this week shipped its second release of the year, with improvements to networking, storage and more.

Kubernetes, under direction of The Linux Foundation, focuses on automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications.

Kubernetes 1.11, announced yesterday (June 27), includes several new features, with project backers especially highlighting two features that have graduated to general availability: IPVS-based In-Cluster Load Balancing and CoreDNS as a cluster DNS add-on option. The release team said these result in increased scalability and flexibility.

"IPVS (IP Virtual Server) provides high-performance in-kernel load balancing, with a simpler programming interface than iptables," the team said in a blog post. "This change delivers better network throughput, better programming latency, and higher scalability limits for the cluster-wide distributed load-balancer that comprises the Kubernetes Service model."

The newly generally available CoreDNS, meanwhile, provides a flexible, extensible and authoritative DNS server. "CoreDNS has fewer moving parts than the previous DNS server, since it’s a single executable and a single process, and supports flexible use cases by creating custom DNS entries," the team said. "It’s also written in Go making it memory-safe."

The team also highlighted several storage enhancements -- including improvements to the Container Storage Interface (CSI) -- which it said have been a focal point for the past two releases. Other new storage functionality includes support for online resizing of Persistent Volumes and for dynamic maximum volume count, which are now both alpha features.

Project backers noted the open source community contributions from hundreds of developers and others, with special thanks given to release team leader Josh Berkus, the Kubernetes Community Manager at Red Hat.

"As the Kubernetes community has grown, our release process represents an amazing demonstration of collaboration in open source software development," the post said. "Kubernetes continues to gain new users at a rapid clip. This growth creates a positive feedback cycle where more contributors commit code creating a more vibrant ecosystem. Kubernetes has over 20,000 individual contributors to date and an active community of more than 40,000 people."

A July 31 webinar is planned to provide more details on the release, along with a five-day series of blog posts focusing on individual aspects of the release, starting in two weeks.