The Linux Foundation Europe launched NeoNephos, a new foundation focused on facilitating a sovereign cloud in Europe. It is backed by European Union funding and supported by the first seven members, including SAP, STACKIT, and T-Systems.

Interestingly, it heavily relies on Kubernetes as its fundamental technology. This is outlined by the list of projects on the NeoNephos website. It includes such Open Source projects as Gardener (a well-known solution implementing Kubernetes-as-a-Service) and CobaltCore (an opinionated OpenStack distribution featuring managed Kubernetes and Kubernetes-based operators for automation).

#news

Kubernetes 1.33 will be released on April 23rd, two weeks from now. It will boast 64 enhancements, including 26 new alpha features. The latter includes support for user namespaces within Linux Pods, in-place resource resize for vertical scaling of Pods, and ordered namespace deletion.

Find a detailed overview of major features and changes coming to Kubernetes 1.33 in this blog post by Cloudsmith and a shorter sneak peek on the project’s official blog.

#news #releases

Have you missed our Cloud Native software digests? Here comes the latest one!

Release Spotlight: Kubeflow 1.10

Kubeflow, a machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes (a CNCF Incubating project), has received many significant changes with its 1.10 release. Training Operator now supports JAX for distributed training, and Katib introduced a new high-level API for hyperparameter tuning. Spark Operator became a core Kubeflow component, with its 2.1.0 included in the platform.

The project got a new user-friendly web UI for Model Registry to manage ML models. The Model Registry was also better integrated with KServe via Custom Storage Initializer (CSI), and KServe got a new Python SDK. Finally, lots of security-related updates arrived, such as leveraging rootless containers in Kubeflow manifests and replacing OIDC-authservice with oauth2-proxy.

Other noticeable updates in the Cloud Native space:

1. KubeVirt, a virtual machine management solution for Kubernetes (a CNCF Incubating project), released its v1.5 a month ago. It brought several features to GA, including migration update strategy and volume migration, auto resource limits for VMIs, VM live updates for hotplugging of CPU/memory/volume resources, and a network binding plugin. It also introduced migrations for hotplugged volumes and dynamic control for the network interface’s link state.

2. Headlamp, a Kubernetes web UI (now part of Kubernetes SIG UI), released 0.30.0. It features two new locales (Traditional Chinese and Italian), an ability to show Custom Resources details in the overlay panel, and a few other improvements.

3. Fluent Bit, a lightweight telemetry agent developed under the umbrella of Fluentd (a CNCF Graduated project), has reached v4.0.0. It comes with conditional processing for logs (i.e. modifying logs based on specific field values), a new trace sampling processor with a pluggable architecture, security enhancements, and experimental support for plugins written in Zig.

4. Thanos, highly available Prometheus with long-term storage (a CNCF Incubating project), released v0.38.0, which added OTLP receiver, native histogram downsampling, caching for regex matchers in series calls, support for chain deduplication algorithm and query offset, and more.

5. Flagger, a progressive delivery Kubernetes operator (part of Flux, a CNCF Graduated project), released 1.41.0, introducing Knative support, support for primary backend cookies in session affinity (Gateway API), and added headers to the Prometheus requests.

6. kgateway, a Cloud Native API Gateway and AI Gateway (a recently accepted CNCF Sandbox project), unveiled the second major release, v2.0.0. It came with custom resources extending Gateway API, better traffic management and security capabilities, open-sourced AI Gateway, and Istio Ambient Waypoint integration.

7. KEDA, a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling (a CNCF Graduated project), was updated to v2.17.0, featuring two new scalers (NSQ and Temporal) and a few deprecations.

#news #releases

Many of us thought or even seriously considered using a general-purpose language instead of YAML for the Kubernetes manifests. Here’s a new project that is solving this issue.

k8skonf allows you to describe your Kubernetes resources in TypeScript and convert them to regular YAML manifests. It’s similar to the cdk8s framework but intentionally limited by one specific language, ensuring its full support. Currently, it also works with CRDs and Helm charts. The project roadmap mentions plans to support Kustomize files and multiple versions of K8s.

Language: TypeScript | License: MPL 2.0 | 30 ⭐️

▶️ GitHub repo
💬 Reddit discussion

#tools

The talks from KubeCon Europe 2025 are now available on YouTube. This playlist features 379 videos.

Note that recordings from the co-located events have not yet been uploaded, but they will be there by the end of this week. Currently, you can find the videos from ArgoCon (34 talks) and Cloud Native Telco Day (11 talks) only.

Finally, the event graphical snapshot highlighting its main stats — such as the record-setting 12418 overall attendees for KubeCon — is attached to this post.

#events #video

GitHub Dependabot now supports Helm. By leveraging the Dependabot version updates, you can ensure the Helm dependencies of your app hosted on GitHub are up to date.

Currently, it works only with image updates in values.yaml, yet a support for the kustomization.yaml files might be added later.

Find more details in the formal announcement and this issue.

#news #security

The most actively developed CNCF projects in 2024 were:

1. Kubernetes
2. OpenTelemetry
3. Argo
4. Backstage
5. Prometheus
6. Cilium
7. gRPC
8. Envoy
9. Meshery
10. Keycloak

That’s what the latest review of the CNCF project velocity revealed. This Top 10 is defined by the number of authors contributing to the projects’ repositories. The graph axes also reflect other criteria, such as commits, PRs, and issues.

You can find a full interactive map with all the projects and related data in this spreadsheet. The scripts used to gather and generate this data are available on GitHub.

#news #cncfprojects

Kubernetes 1.33 was just released and codenamed Octarine.

It brings 64 enhancements: 18 stable, 20 beta, 24 alpha, and 2 deprecated. New alpha features include:

- New configuration option for kubectl with .kuberc for user preferences
- Configurable tolerance for HorizontalPodAutoscalers
- Configurable container restart delay
- Custom container stop signals
- Numerous Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) enhancements
- Robust image pull policy to authenticate images for IfNotPresent and Never
- Node topology labels are available via downward API
- Better Pod status with generation and observed generation
... and more!

Features that became stable in v1.33 include Sidecar containers, Job success policy, and nftables backend for kube-proxy.

Find full details in this formal announcement.

#news #releases

OpenTofu just became a CNCF Sandbox project.

#news #cncfprojects

The latest Open Source drama came straight into the CNCF's hands. We haven’t seen such cases before: Synadia, the principal maintainer and original creator of NATS, a CNCF Incubating project, wants to get the ownership for this project back from the vendor-neutral home.

Synadia’s plan involved becoming the owner of the NATS project again and switching to the BSL license—which OSI does not consider Open Source—for future releases to ensure its business sustainability. However, CNCF insists there is no “way out” for the foundation's projects and suggests forking its repositories instead.

While Synadia is undoubtedly the leading developing force for NATS, the CNCF has helped the project thrive in many ways since its donation in 2018. In addition to the obvious marketing benefits, NATS also received funding for two third-party security audits and financial support for trademark legal expenses.

If Synadia stops contributing to NATS and there is not enough interest from other community members in developing a project, it might end up archived in the CNCF. The CNCF TOC has already started evaluating the health of this project.

Find more details about this story in the:
- original blog post by CNCF (posted on April 24th and updated on April 28th);
- official answer from Synadia (April 25th);
- Bluesky thread started by Joe Beda (posted on April 26th and answered by Derek Collison, founder and CEO @ Synadia);
- CNCF TOC issue regarding NATS health state.

#news #cncfprojects

What could be the best possible outcome of the NATS case? “CNCF and Synadia today announced that the widely-adopted NATS project will continue to thrive in the cloud native open source ecosystem of the CNCF with Synadia’s continued support and involvement.”

It’s not a fiction, it’s for real! Bravo to all the parties involved 🥳

#news #cncfprojects

Last month, in-toto became the latest (31st) CNCF Graduated project.

in-toto is an SSC (software supply chain) security framework created at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Written in Python, it ensures the integrity of a software product from initiation to end-user installation by informing the user which steps are performed and when. The project joined the CNCF Sandbox in 2019, became Incubating in 2022, and was declared Graduated now.

Find more details in the official graduation announcement, project website and main GitHub repo.

#news #cncfprojects

Happy to share our newest digest of the prominent software updates in the Cloud Native ecosystem!

1. Envoy, a high-performance edge/middle/service proxy (a CNCF Graduated project), has seen its 1.34.0 release with alpha support for asynchronous load balancing, initial support for shared libraries to be loaded at runtime, support for Fluentd tracer, configurable custom commands for Redis proxy, configurable backoff strategy for TCP proxy retries, new compliance policies TLS parameter to enforce restrictions, and much more.

2. Percona Everest, a Cloud Native database platform for managing PostgreSQL, MongoDB and MySQL instances, was updated to 1.6.0. It introduced support for manual storage scaling, seamless major version upgrades for MongoDB, support for PostgreSQL 17, and other enhancements.

3. Rook, a storage orchestration for Kubernetes (a CNCF Graduated project), released its v1.17 with numerous updates. They include secure ObjectBucketClaims by default, credential management for CephObjectStoreUser, authentication mechanism for bucket notifications using Kafka topics, Ceph CSI 3.14 and improved Ceph CSI Operator, external (configured outside the Kubernetes cluster) mons, and Kubernetes v1.33 support.

4. Artifact Hub, a web application to find and install Cloud Native packages (a CNCF Incubating project), reached v1.21.0, featuring support for bootable containers images and experimental deletion protection.

5. Linkerd, a service mesh for Kubernetes (a CNCF Graduated project), announced 2.18 with optional protocol declarations (in addition to existing auto-detection), GitOps-compatible multicluster linking, decoupled Gateway API, and experimental Windows support.

6. Vitess, a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL (a CNCF Graduated project), released 22.0.0 with prepared statements, new VTGate metrics, stalled-disk recovery, improved errant GTID detection, better performance, and updated Kubernetes operator with automated backups and Kubernetes 1.32 support.

#news #releases

Tomorrow, KubeCrash will host another online conference about Cloud Native technologies for Platform Engineers. It will feature a panel discussion on observability in Platform Engineering and 13 talks and keynotes, all delivered by well-known CNCF Ambassadors, engineers, and tech leaders.

KubeCrash Spring 2025 is an entirely free online event. It will start tomorrow (May 8th) at 4 PM CET (10 AM ET, 7 AM PT). Check the full schedule and register to participate if you're interested.

#events

Perhaps most engineers still prefer to type full, even if quite long, CLI commands in their terminals. However, with all the GenAI hype we have now, automated assistance comes everywhere, and good old kubectl is not an exception.

kubectl-ai was created in the Google GKE team, enabling a chatbot-style experience for your kubectl commands. It runs in interactive mode or as a kubectl plugin and allows you to:
- use simple English to construct and execute the kubectl commands, including the required sequences of such;
- benefit from the UNIX shell integration by leveraging pipelines and basic CLI tools (echo, cat, etc.);
- run commands only after your explicit approval;
- use OpenAI, Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Grok, and local AI models (via Ollama or llama.cpp);
- evaluate the performance of different LLM models [for Kubernetes-related tasks] via its own benchmark called k8s-bench.

Language: Go | License: Apache 2.0 | 2529 ⭐️

▶️ GitHub repo
💬 Reddit discussion

#tools #CLI #genai

The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee restructures its groups. While the restructuring is currently underway and nominations for leadership roles are now open, the following new entities are announced:

- TOC Initiatives: Artificial Intelligence;
- TOC Subprojects: Contributor Strategy and Advocacy, Mentoring, and Project Reviews;
- Technical Advisory Groups: Developer Experience, Infrastructure, Operational Resilience, Security and Compliance, and Workloads Foundation.

Find more details about the changes, the dates for the first meetings and related Slack channels of these entities in this blog post.

#news

MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, bridging AI models and various data sources, are a big thing now. Two leading GitOps solutions just embraced them:

1. Last week, Akuity announced the public availability of Argo CD MCP Server with its v0.1.1 release. It provides access to Argo CD resources and operations and enables AI assistants to interact with your Argo CD applications via natural language. It supports stdio and SSE transport modes to integrate with Visual Studio Code and other MCP clients. Find more info in the project's GitHub repo.

2. Yesterday’s release of Flux Operator v0.20.0 introduced an experimental MCP server created by Control Plane. It connects AI assistants to Kubernetes clusters running Flux Operator and enables interaction through natural language. Find more details about it, including a helpful prompting guide, in the project’s documentation.

P.S. Bonus on a broader MCP topic. Recently, an Awesome DevOps MCP Servers repo emerged on GitHub. It lists dozens of MCP servers focused on DevOps tools, featuring existing integrations with Kubernetes, Prometheus, GitHub, GitLab, cloud services, and much more.

#news #tools #gitops

A new educational website dubbed K8s Issues Explorer and featuring ~500 Kubernetes production issues has emerged. Targeted at Kubernetes operators and SREs, it provides information about various real-life issues that emerged while using Kubernetes.

Each case is described with diagnosis steps, root cause, applied fix, and lessons learned, with recommendations on how to prevent such situations. All issues are classified into cluster management, networking, security, storage, and scaling & load categories.

P.S. Interestingly, while all the data for issues was provided by another person (in this GitHub repo), the website was entirely built by GenAI, and you can find more details on this here.

#career

Excited to announce our newest digest of the prominent software updates in the Cloud Native ecosystem! It comes with lots of significant releases — enjoy & share 🙏

Release Spotlight: etcd v3.6.0

Yesterday, etcd (a CNCF Graduated project) announced its first feature release in 4 years(!). The database migrated to v3store, a new storage engine with better performance and transactional support. Etcd now also fully supports downgrade (to migrate the data schema to a required etcd version), Kubernetes-style feature gates (to manage new features), new discovery protocol (v3discovery), and /livez and /readyz endpoints similar to Kubernetes liveness and readiness probes.

New etcd version reduces the average memory consumption by at least 50% and improves both read and write throughput by approximately 10%.

Other noticeable updates in the Cloud Native space:

1. Kyverno, a Cloud Native policy engine (a CNCF Incubating project), released its 1.14, bringing two new specialised policy types (ValidatingPolicy and ImageValidatingPolicy), streamlined validation with improved CEL support and performance, enhanced supply chain security with dedicated image verification, and CEL expressions support in policy exceptions.

2. Helmfile, a declarative spec for deploying Helm charts, reached its v1.0.0. This update introduced the ability to sync release labels to the target release across various commands and configurations, added the --take-ownership flag to helm diff, and removed several outdated features, such as its double rendering workaround and loading charts.yaml.

3. Calico, a Cloud Native networking and network security solution from Tigera, was updated to v3.30.0 with many new features. They include tech previews for Calico Whisker (a web console for network activity observability), flow logs API, and Calico Ingress Gateway (an enterprise-hardened distribution of Envoy Gateway). It also introduced staged network policies to test policies before applying them, Quality of Service controls, service LoadBalancer IP allocation support in IPAM, custom host endpoints for nodes, OpenStack Caracal support, and even more.

4. Argo CD (a CNCF Graduated project) released v3.0.0, featuring fine-grained update/delete RBAC enforcement on resources, revised defaults for new installations based on best practices, and official recommendations on secrets management.

5. Istio (a CNCF Graduated project) released 1.26.0, which added customisation of resources provisioned by the Gateway API, improved Gateway API support (TCPRoute in waypoints and experimental BackendTLSPolicy), experimental support for the ClusterTrustBundle resource in Kubernetes, and specific checks in istioctl analyze.

6. containerd (a CNCF Graduated project) released 2.1.0, adding OCI/Image Volume Source support, container restore through CRI/Kubernetes, erofs snapshotter and differ, multiple uid/gid mappings support in runtime, and multipart layer fetch and unpacking custom media types in image distribution.

7. Freelens, an Open Source fork of Lens IDE for Kubernetes, was updated to v1.3.0, and got an extension template for developers, Kubernetes 1.33 support, a Windows ARM64 version, and a modified light theme.

#news #releases

A brief update on the Freelens project, which is an active Open Source fork of Lens IDE.

It now features a Flux CD extension, making it another UI option for Flux users*. Currently, the extension offers a dashboard for Application components and Events, detailed views of Flux CD resource information, and menus for reconciling, syncing, and automating Flux CD resources. Find more details in this GitHub repo.

* It’s also worth reminding that last year, another Kubernetes GUI, Headlamp, released a Flux plugin that provides an overview of the Flux installation for its users.

#news #tools #gui #gitops

llm-d is a new Open Source project and community for scalable GenAI deployments in Kubernetes.

Described as “a Kubernetes-native high-performance distributed LLM inference framework,” llm-d leverages existing technologies, such as vLLM, Kubernetes, and Inference Gateway, to provide a vLLM-optimised inference scheduler, disaggregated serving, and disaggregated prefix caching. The authors also plan to implement a traffic- and hardware-aware autoscaler.

You can find more details on llm-d in:
- yesterday’s announcement by CoreWeave, Google, IBM Research, NVIDIA, and Red Hat;
- the project’s GitHub repo.

#news #genai #tools