What’s New In Kubernetes 1.29 ?

Kubernetes is an open-source Container Orchestrator tool that helps in managing microservices and it provides several functionalities and features around that with some monitoring features too. Kubernetes itself is a huge and complex project under CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Kubernetes is a huge and complex project and 2nd largest open-source project in the world after Linux-Kernel. Every year 3 releases/updates of Kubernetes come every quarter, which gives us an idea of like from what velocity the project is moving ahead. In this article, we will discuss some of the prominent features, enhancements, and deprecations of the recent release Kubernetes 1.29. But before jumping on it, let’s see some real-life use cases of Kubernetes to give a gist about how awesomely the project is evolving and helping out large enterprises in managing their applications.

Real-World Implementations And Addressing Those Problems

• Secure and Scalable Applications: Kubernetes’ ability to keep data in its Kubernetes clusters secure while being vendor-neutral made financial businesses trust Kubernetes and its unmatchable scalability power helps keep payment gateway-like applications reliable and fast.

• Resource Management at Scale: In the past many organizations and MNCs have realized the value of efficient resource management and Kubernetes does an excellent job when it comes to resource allocation and management.

• Security Concerns: Nowadays many cloud-native tools are emerging for handling vulnerabilities and taking care of security-related issues, that integrate pretty well with the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes itself works with tight security policies that keep intrusion and vulnerabilities away to a large extent.

• Cultural Shifts: The cultural shift and wide adoption of microservice tooling over a monolithic approach is creating a culture of automation, and evolvement of new ways for maintaining, designing and deploying software.

What’s The Ideology Behind The ‘Mandala’ Theme?

Like every release, at the end of the release cycle, the lead of the release team gets a chance to present a logo and theme for that release. This time Kubernetes 1.29 was released with a ‘Mandala’ theme and a logo that shows typical designs very similar to Indian culture. It represents the Universe of Cloud-native community where people of different backgrounds and diversity are contributing to Kubernetes, through which Kubernetes is where it is now. In this release, around 1422 contributors from 888+ countries along with 1.29 Release Team contributed to the project and made this release possible, which resulted in 49 enhancements (11 stable, 19 beta, 19 alpha).

New Features Of Kubernetes v1.29

• ‘ReadWriteOncePod’ for persistent volume nodes, will now be set to ‘on’ by default.
• ‘PodLifecycleSleepAction‘ feature is introduced in this release, you can use it in a manifest deployment file with webhooks such as Sleep, Lifecycle, preStop. The time specified here should be less than graceful period, and it helps a lot for achieving zero down-time upgrades.
• ‘matchLabelKeys’ is an alpha feature introduced in this cycle, you can specify it in a manifest pod file under ‘spec’ and ‘podAffinity’ sub-category where you can specify ‘matchLabelKeys’ with appropriate key value for the pod manifest file. It also enhanes functionalites of podAffinity.
• Added support of Contaierd, kubelet will be able to pull different images depending on different Container runtime class for Windows.

Enhancements In New Kubernetes v1.29

• CSI Node expansion secret now graduated to stable from beta. It can now be used to validate the size of block storage before its expansion.
• New controller with name ‘taint-eviction-controller’ is introduced for ‘taintBasedPodEviction’. Now it will be easier to manage Pod eviction as 2 new metrics are also launched for the same that are ‘pod deletion total’ and ‘pod deletion duration seconds’. These 2 metrices will basically count the no. of deleted pods and the time it took to do this task. For using it, you have to enable ‘separateTaintEvictionController’.
• ‘ReadWriteOncePod’ feature moved to GA/Stable, it will make sure that only one pod across the whole cluster can read a particular PVC {‘PersistentVolumeClaim’} and write to it.
• ‘PodReadytoStartContainers’ feature is actually a condition set by kubelet, that creates an isolated sandbox with all the networking configuration for a pod whenever kubelet receives a request for creation of a pod in any node. It provides more visibility and security that helps specially when something goes wrong, and we need to troubleshoot it. This feature was enhanced and moved to beta in this release.
• ‘SideCarContainers’ feature moved to beta.

Deprecations And Removals

• Feature gates for ‘cloud providers’ and ‘kubelet cloud credential providers’ will now be disabled by default, meaning now users who are using entry level cloud providers will now be forced to use external cloud providers.
• Users will now have to use “-cloud-provider=external” on kubelet of every node.

Future Trends In Kubernetes

• Community Support: Kubernetes welcoming open-source community is very active, and the number of contributors of different diversity are increasing time to time that is surely going to increase collaboration among contributors and other industries that will benefit the entire ecosystem.

• Sustainability: Folks in Cloud-native community are taking initiatives to spread awareness about sustainability. In future, we can expect that efforts may be directed towards minimizing the carbon footprint of Kubernetes deployments.

• AI Integration: As Generative AI is trending nowadays with lots of innovative applications around it. This is also going to impact Cloud-native applications. After a period of time, Kubernetes community will also take advantage of this technologies to optimize and automate some component of either their application or processes where humans are supposed to spend a lot of time.

• Enhanced serverless capabilities: Deployment and autoscaling of serverless functions within a K8s environment, is providing a unified platform for both microservices & serverless applications, one such project that is working in this direction is Knative.

• WASM: Web Assembly, for sure it’s increased adoption in cloud-native space and in Kubernetes community will help in creating portable and language-agnostic microservices, with an adoptable but diverse infrastructure with a secure easy to manage infrastructure.

Conclusion

Kubernetes 1.29 with the help of community support made possible 49 enhancements with this release including some newly added features, some deprecations, some features advancing to beta or stable state as well. In this article, we saw some of the prominent and interesting ones in detail and how it impacts user. For a full detailed overview of all the deprecations and features refer original Kubernetes blog of 1.29 release. Thanks for reading till here, if you found this article insightful then don’t forget to give it a thumbs-up.

New Kubernetes v1.29 – FAQs

How Often Releases Of Kubernetes Come In A Year?

A 3 times a year on quarterly basis, where each release cycle runs for somewhere around 10 to 14 weeks.

How Can I Be A Part Of A Release Cycle Of Kubernetes?

When a release cycle was about to end, the application forms for the roles of Release Team Shadow for different teams gets open. You can apply to it and if you get selected then you will be working under a team lead with 3-4 other Shadows for approximately a quarter. Later on, you can also lead that team for an upcoming cycle if you qualify for it.

What Is The Stipend Of Shadows And Leads In Release Team Shadow Program Of Kubernetes?

No stipend is provided as it is considered a voluntary role by Kubernetes community.

What Are The Eligibility And Selection Criteria For This Program?

You can read about it in-detail via offical documentation of kubernetes contributor site and rolebooks. Basically, the selections are made on the basis of someone’s activeness in kubernetes community, experience contributing to kubernetes, involvement in a particular group/SIG.

How To Get Up To Date With News And Important Information Related To Kubernetes?

Kubernetes Slack channel, Mailing list and official blogs of Kubernetes are among one of the best ways to stay up to date with news and important information related to Kubernetes.