KubeSchool by Portainer

As Neil Cresswell, CEO of Portainer, said on Reddit, one of his engineers recently asked him to help better understand Kubernetes architecture and components. Answering this request, he decided to go bigger and launched KubeSchool.

It's an educational website featuring 15 chapters on Kubernetes basics for beginners. They cover the core ideas behind K8s, its main components, pluggable layers (CNI, CSI, CRDs, etc.), and production-ready recommendations.

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Confidential Containers became a CNCF Incubating project

Another level up has just happened in the CNCF, with its TOC accepting moving Confidential Containers to the Incubating level. This project enables confidential computing by leveraging hardware-based TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) to protect containers and data by encrypting data during computation.

Confidential Containers started in 2021 by Red Hat, Intel, IBM, and other companies. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in March 2022. Today, this technology is used in IBM LinuxONE, Red Hat OpenShift, Kubermatic KubeOne, Alibaba Cloud, and several other solutions.

#news #cncfprojects #security

Kubeflow became a CNCF Graduated project

The summer series of CNCF level-ups keeps going, and Kubeflow has just joined the list of the organisation’s most mature (i.e. Graduated) projects. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted for this graduation last Friday.

Kubeflow is a machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes that serves as a foundation for K8s-based AI platforms. Its subprojects include Pipelines for end-to-end ML workflows, Trainer for distributed AI model training and LLM fine-tuning, Katib for AutoML, and a Kubernetes operator for Apache Spark.

Kubeflow originated in Google, with its first public announcement in 2017. It was accepted into the CNCF as an Incubating project in July 2023. Today, its adopters include Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, and Tencent.

#news #cncfprojects #aiml

OpenTelemetry got a one-command Linux setup

The OpenTelemetry Packaging SIG introduced a ready-to-use opentelemetry package for Linux distributions that installs the OpenTelemetry Injector together with the OpenTelemetry SDKs and auto-instrumentation packages for various programming languages (Java, .NET, Node.js, and Python).

It is now available as an APT repository (for Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives) and a YUM repository (for Fedora, RHEL, and derivatives). Find more details in this announcement or read the full instructions on GitHub.

#news #observability

Thought of running agents on Kubernetes more efficiently? Here’s a project from Google that you might find useful.

Agent Substrate is an experimental system for running agents and similar workloads on Kubernetes at scale, providing specialised scheduling and controls to improve scalability and reduce latency. It relies on Kubernetes Pods and Pod autoscaling (but not K8s control plane) and manages the lifecycle of "actors" (agents or similar apps): creating and destroying them, assigning them to Pods, and routing traffic to them. It handles OCI containers at the kernel level via gVisor, so it can work with apps that are built on any stack.

▶️ GitHub repo

Language: Go | License: Apache 2.0 | 912 ⭐️

#tools

What to expect in Kubernetes v1.37

The next Kubernetes release, v1.37, is scheduled later this month, on August 26th. It will come with several important deprecations (e.g., static Pods won't longer reference Secrets/ConfigMaps, the ipvs mode will be removed from kube-proxy) and over 20 new features, including Recreate update strategy for StatefulSets, volume health monitor, default Pod sysctls in Kubelet, CompositePodGroup API, and others.

Learn more about these upcoming changes from the first related articles published last week:

- Kubernetes 1.37: Deep dive into new alpha features on Palark tech blog;
- Kubernetes v1.37 Sneak Peek on the official Kubernetes blog.

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New free Kubernetes workshop

Konrad Heimel announced the Kubernetes Practitioner Workshop, a GitHub repo that offers structured educational content for engineers looking to learn Kubernetes concepts and practice them. It comes with:

- 28 topics (e.g., Containers, StatefulSet, The operator pattern, or Helm), each presented with 20-30 slides and accompanied with a practical lab requiring 15-30 minutes to complete;
- two types of environments for labs: a specific namespace on a shared cluster or a local kind cluster;
- downloadable PDFs provided as GitHub releases;
- facilitator guide with additional notes on setting up the required environment and running this workshop.

All content is free and available as Open Source (under the Zero-Clause BSD permissive license).

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Community has met KYAML, a strict subset of standard YAML for Kubernetes (KEP-5295), with mixed feelings. However, it will become stable in the upcoming Kubernetes v1.37 release. Thus, yesterday’s Kubernetes blog post on what KYAML is and how to use it* may be helpful.

* TL;DR: via kubectl -o kyaml or yamlfmt (from Kubernetes itself or Google).

#articles

Headlamp GUI got a plugin for Argo CD

A few days ago, Headlamp, a Kubernetes web UI developed by the Kubernetes SIG and recommended as a successor to the Kubernetes Dashboard, got another prominent plugin: for Argo CD. It adds native views for Argo CD resources in the dashboard. It already supports Applications and AppProjects, can show a GitOps summary (source/destination, revision, health, etc.), managed resources, sync policy and history, and more.

However, it's still in alpha, which comes with numerous limitations (i.e. it can't fully replace the original Argo CD UI). Find more details and screenshots about this plugin on its 0.1.0-alpha release page.

P.S. Last year, Headlamp also got a plugin for another well-known GitOps tool, Flux. It is still actively developed, with its most recent version 0.7.0 released just two weeks ago.

#news #gitops #gui #releases

Although GitHub isn't feeling well right now, here comes our newest digest of the prominent software updates in the Cloud Native ecosystem!

1. Rancher released v2.15.0, bringing general availability of native CAPI infrastructure providers, inherited namespace rules for GlobalRoles, restrictions for local UI authentication when EAP is configured, a new high-performance Workloads Overview UI view, and support for Kubernetes v1.36.

2. Karpenter, a Kubernetes node autoscaler developed by the Kubernetes SIG, was updated to v1.14.0, which added the allocator for DRA, extended DRA support for partitionable devices and consumable capacity, a Balanced consolidation policy, per-offering resource overrides, and support for the CapacityBuffer API.

3. Cilium (a CNCF Graduated project) released 1.20.0 with lots of improvements. They include support for TCPRoute and UDPRoute in the Gateway API, encrypting traffic between the gateway and application services, migration to multi-pool IPAM, topology-aware service traffic (PreferSameZone and PreferSameNode in Kubernetes), stable Kubernetes Multi-Cluster Services API support, cluster-scoped policy API from Kubernetes upstream (ClusterNetworkPolicy), per-Service load-balancing mode annotations for VXLAN, and a 4-time smaller cilium-cni binary.

4. Cozystack, a PaaS platform and framework for building clouds (a CNCF Sandbox project), released v1.6.0. It migrated tenant Kubernetes workers from Ubuntu and kubeadm to Talos Linux, made tenant resource quotas hierarchical, moved etcd to etcd-operator v1alpha2, introduced a new tenant-facing and namespace-scoped firewall resource (SecurityGroup), and made several improvements to Keycloak.

5. KServe, a distributed generative and predictive AI inference platform (a CNCF Incubating project), released v0.20.0. It introduced numerous new features, including managed DRA for LLMInferenceService, support for confidential model serving, AutoGluon support, the ability to use multiple OCI sources in storageUris, platform-specific hooks for service customisation, a traffic-splitting API for controlled deployment, and canary rollouts for the RawDeployment mode.

6. wasmCloud, a platform for running WebAssembly workloads (a CNCF Incubating project), reached its v2.7.0. It brought concurrent pooled instances, trusted private OCI CA roots with the e2e registry behind TLS, implements and maps enabled by default, and a unified mechanism for connection limiting.

#news #releases