The newly released Kubernetes 1.17 includes enhancements such as the general availability of cloud provider labels and the betas for Kubernetes Volume Snapshot and the Kubernetes in-tree storage plugin to Container Storage Interface (CSI) migration infrastructure.
The team behind the new release explained that when nodes and volumes are created, a set of standard labels are applied based on the underlying cloud provider of the Kubernetes cluster. Nodes get a label for the instance type.
The labels have now reached general availability since their initial beta in v1.2. Kubernetes components have been updated to populate the GA and beta labels and to react to both.
The new release also includes the beta of Volume Snapshots, which represents a point-in-time copy of a volume.
“By providing a standard way to trigger snapshot operations in the Kubernetes API, Kubernetes users can now handle use cases like this without having to go around the Kubernetes API (and manually executing storage system specific operations),” the Kubernetes developers explained in a post. “Instead, Kubernetes users are now empowered to incorporate snapshot operations in a cluster agnostic way into their tooling and policy with the comfort of knowing that it will work against arbitrary Kubernetes clusters regardless of the underlying storage.”
In addition, the migration of in-tree plugins to CSI enables the replacement of existing in-tree storage plugins such as ‘kubernetes.io/gce-pd’ or ‘kubernetes.io/aws-ebs.’
When a Kubernetes cluster administrator updates a cluster to enable CSI migration, existing stateful deployments and workloads continue to function as they always have; however, behind the scenes Kubernetes hands control of all storage management operations (previously targeting in-tree drivers) to CSI drivers, the team explained.
In total, Kubernetes 1.17 includes 22 enhancements, 14 of which have graduated to stable, 4 moving to beta and 4 entering alpha.
