k8gb v1.0.0

k8gb, a Kubernetes Global Balancer, originated at Absa Group. More than six years have passed since the first whiteboard session in Johannesburg, conducted by Yury Tsarev and Bradley Andersen, both employed by this company at the time. In 2021, k8gb was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, and earlier this year, as we mentioned recently, it became a CNCF Incubating project.

Yesterday, right during its 100th community meeting, the k8gb maintainers pushed the v1.0.0 release. This update highlights a significant milestone in the project's maturity.

#releases #cncfprojects #networking

We all know (and many of us use daily) k9s as a truly flagship CLI tool for Kubernetes. But what if someone were to reimagine it today?

Meet sofka, which reimplements a well-known tool using one generic object pipeline (instead of separate structs for each resource type) and Rust. It performs better and offers lots of features you might need, including:

- Powerful keyboard-based navigation with curated columns, custom views, drill-down navigation, horizontal scrolling, global fuzzy find, compact mode, and mouse support.
- Powerful metrics and health support, covering Pod health, live CPU and memory values, workload health at a glance, evidence-based explanation for unhealthy resources, hierarchical Xray view, watch notifications, and more.
- Extended diagnostic capabilities with incident bundles and snapshots capturing the current table view.
- Embedded Helm and GitOps integration.
- Various executable actions, such as file transfers, debugging containers and Pods, exploring PVC contents, and right-sizing requests.

What makes it different from k9s? Built-in Flux CD and Argo CD support, port-forwarding running in the background, bulk actions with multiselect, skins (12 are available), and more.

▶️ GitHub repo
 
Language: Rust | License: Apache 2.0 and MIT | 672 ⭐️

#tools #CLI

Karmada became a CNCF Graduated project

Karmada extends the standard Kubernetes API, allowing orchestration of applications across multiple clusters, clouds, and regions without modifying the apps themselves. Earlier this month, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to graduate Karmada, and the decision was formally announced on the CNCF blog now.

Karmada originated in Huawei and was publicly announced at the Huawei Developer Conference 2021. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in September 2021 and promoted to the Incubating level in December 2023. Today, Karmada adopters include Alibaba Cloud, Bloomberg, Huawei, Trip.com, Vivo, and Wellhub.

#news #cncfprojects

Talos gets a hypervisor, and Sidero Labs joins Yardi

Big news arrived for Talos Linux, a well-known Open Source operating system designed for Kubernetes. First, this project adds a hypervisor to run virtual machines. Interestingly, their solution is not based on KubeVirt. The authors say that requiring "Kubernetes just to run VMs" is an "unnecessary complexity", so they "brought native hypervisor capabilities into Talos Linux" (based on KVM). It will be Open Source. Talos Hypervisor launch (the alpha release and a public demo) will take place during TalosCon 2026, which will be held on October 15-16 in Amsterdam. Its general availability is expected in December.

Secondly, Sidero Labs, the commercial company behind Talos, joins Yardi. It's a US-based software business focused on the real estate industry, with 10k+ employees across 40+ offices worldwide. As Sidero Labs outlines, it will continue to operate as a standalone company, and Talos Linux will remain fully Open Source under the same license (MPL 2.0).

#news #virtualisation

Sharing the latest version of our curated digest showcasing prominent software updates in the Cloud Native ecosystem!

1. Argo Workflows, a workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs on Kubernetes (a part of Argo, a CNCF Graduated project), released its 4.1, which added 31 new features. They cover OpenTelemetry traces for the controller and executor, Kubernetes DRA support, Pod-level requests and limits, initless Pods, streaming save path for artifact drivers, database authentication via AWS RDS IAM and Azure PostgreSQL Entra ID, MariaDB support, workflow-level executor plugin configuration, and more.

2. Prometheus (a CNCF Graduated project) released 3.14.0 with PromQL duration expressions enabled by default and first_over_time promoted to stable, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute service discovery, and experimental support for encoding start timestamps in histograms.

3. Crossplane (a CNCF Graduated project) released 2.4.0, which added watching the resources required by each XR, zero replicas for just-launched safe-start provider runtimes (until they become active), vulnerability-scannable container images, hardening across composition and package paths, and version-aware documentation search

4. Strimzi, a Kafka operator for Kubernetes (a CNCF Incubating project), has seen its 1.2.0 with Apache Kafka 4.3.1 support, templated (per Pod) additional volumes, eliminated auto-mounting of Service Account tokens into Pods, server-side apply becoming GA, and more updates.

5. Open Policy Agent (a CNCF Graduated project) released v1.20.0, featuring new Rego keywords (and and or) for combining conditions inside a single rule body as well as dozens of other improvements across the project's whole ecosystem.

6. Istio (a CNCF Graduated project) reached 1.31.0. This release added a GatewayClass for deploying agentgateway as a waypoint proxy, Gateway API AllowInsecureFallback feature implementation for client certificate validation, weighted waypoint canaries, zone-aware load balancing, mesh-wide default traffic policy, FIPS 140-3 compliance policy, ztunnel CPU-aware worker threads, multi-target Prometheus scraping, and many more new features.

7. Inspektor Gadget, a set of tools and framework for inspecting Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts using eBPF (a CNCF Sandbox project), was updated to v0.56.0. It introduced experimental support for Kubernetes multi-tenancy (based on namespaces), rootless ig image commands, and switching to kubelet's /сonfigz for container runtime socket auto-detection.

#news #releases

Skaffold ceases to exist

Skaffold is a CLI tool from Google designed for local development of Kubernetes applications. It has been around since 2018. According to the Slack announcement posted last month, the project won't be maintained anymore, and its GitHub repo will be archived starting January 15, 2027.

#tools #news

KubeVM from VMware Tanzu joins CNCF Sandbox

Tanzu, VMware's Kubernetes platform, has a VM Operator project that enables virtual machine management via a Kubernetes-style declarative API. It brought to life another project called KubeVM, which was developed in a separate branch of its repo and implemented “a vendor-neutral Kubernetes API for managing the full lifecycle of virtual machines on any hypervisor, implemented through pluggable providers.”

How is it different from KubeVirt? Here's how the KubeVM authors explain: “KubeVM leaves the VM as a native object of the underlying platform and uses Kubernetes as the API surface, delegating placement, migration, and storage to that platform. The two answer the same question for different starting conditions: Kubernetes as the only infrastructure layer, versus Kubernetes as a front door to an existing one. The relationship is intended to be integration: a KubeVirt provider is on KubeVM's roadmap, so the portable API can run on KubeVirt.”

A month ago, KubeVM applied to joining the CNCF Sandbox. A few days ago, the project was accepted by the CNCF TOC.

#news #cncfprojects #virtualisation

Agent Orca, a Kubernetes-native platform for managing AI agents

A few days ago, Matthew Fisher, solutions architect at NVIDIA, announced an Open Source project called Agent Orca. It's a platform for deploying, managing, and running AI agents in Kubernetes at scale. It allows you to use K8s resources to "declaratively define agents, route them to the correct LLM, equip them with tools, and execute them as one-off jobs or long-running services with checkpoints, cost tracking, guardrails, and RAG built in."

There's a quick-start manual for giving Agent Orca a try, seven demos, and quite extensive documentation for both developers and operators.

▶️ GitHub repo
 
Language: Go | License: Apache 2.0 | 61 ⭐️

#news #tools #aiml

gVisor was donated to CNCF and joins its Sandbox

gVisor is a well-known "container sandbox", an application kernel that runs in userspace and implements a Linux-like interface to isolate running applications and the host operating system. It was developed by Google and became Open Source in 2018. Today, gVisor is part of the numerous Google products, including GKE, Google Cloud Run, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail.

In September, Google opened a formal request to consider gVisor for the CNCF Sandbox. By the end of the month, the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept it. In October, a blog post announcing the donation of gVisor to the CNCF was published. It also revealed the gVisor author' intention to begin moving to the CNCF Incubated projects in the next few months.

#news #cncfprojects

Migrating virtual machines from your older infrastructure to Kubernetes? There's a helpful tool to facilitate this process.

Forklift was created specifically to migrate various virtual machines to KubeVirt. The project originated in Red Hat for its OpenShift Virtualization, but then it became a community effort for wider adoption. What it supports:

- migrating VMs from VMware vSphere, Open Virtual Appliances (OVAs), oVirt, OpenStack, Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KubeVirt;
- warm migrations for VMware vSphere and oVirt (using CBT snapshots/incremental backup), hot migrations for KubeVirt (v4.20+);
- migrations to remote clusters;
- custom hooks to perform operations on VMs before and after migration;
- validation rules based on Open Policy Agent (OPA) to check VM migration suitability.

▶️ GitHub repo

Language: Go | License: Apache 2.0 | 198 ⭐️

#tools #virtualisation

Sharing our latest selection of interesting Kubernetes-related articles to consider for reading:

1. "Comparing Policy Engines in Kubernetes" by Mustafa Erdinç Zorba.

As you may know, ValidatingAdmissionPolicy has been generally available since Kubernetes 1.30, and MutatingAdmissionPolicy became generally available in Kubernetes 1.36. This brought a question to my mind: Do I still need Kyverno? I’ve been using Kyverno very extensively for different reasons, and I have several technical reasons to choose it over Gatekeeper. But now we have a new player in town, and it is natively supported by kube-apiserver (meaning Kubernetes itself)!

2. "Kubernetes v1.37: Hardening Container Storage with Bind Mount Options and EmptyDir Permissions" by Nispriha Jagan and Neeraj Krishna Gopalakrishna.

Kubernetes v1.37 brings important storage security features: emptyDir permission modes and bind mount options. They help application programmers and security professionals implement rigorous security policies, for example, prohibiting deletion of files across containers or execution of arbitrary binaries from writable volumes, directly in Kubernetes without any complicated circumvention.

3. "Five key autoscaling metrics for Kubernetes" by drmorr, Applied Computing Research Labs.

At ACRL, we’ve identified five “key metrics” that you should be tracking for your autoscaling engines, and—spoiler—they might not be the normal ones you think of. In this post, we’ll do a quick overview, and then spend future posts digging into some details. If you’re curious, follow along below!

4. "Kubernetes Grace Period Is Not Your Grace Period" by Vikas Yadav.

If you only look at the Kubernetes setting, you can end up with a system that looks generous on paper but still kills jobs much earlier in practice. When these timeouts are not aligned, deployments, node drains, and other routine operations can turn into interrupted jobs and hard-to-explain failures. In this article, we follow the shutdown chain, see why the shortest shutdown timeout is the one that matters, and show how to identify and prevent these hidden gaps.

5. "Practical Kubernetes Tips for Everyday Ops" by Gmkziz.

A set of practical Kubernetes tips (or how-tos) that may help you in your day-to-day operations. Formating outputs, filtering objects, waiting for pods and more.

6. "Istio, Hands-On, Part 1: Where Requests Go, and Who Decides" by Filipe Motta.

Istio, Hands-On is a six-part series about running Istio on a platform that has to keep serving traffic while you change it. Every part follows the same payments platform, from payments-api and its first canary to the partners and clusters it reaches at the end. Each part explains the concepts first and then shows them working in a companion repository that builds the scenario on kind and tests what the article claims, most of it by counting responses. The order is the order in which a team meets the problems. Part 1 covers what a mesh is made of and the first decision it takes over, which is routing.

#articles

Cozystack became a CNCF Incubating project

The CNCF TOC has just voted to promote Cozystack to the Incubating level. Cozystack is a platform and framework for building clouds offering Kubernetes and various managed services, including virtual machines, databases, and more, all based on well-known Open Source solutions. The project originated in Ænix and was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in March 2025.

#news #cncfprojects