The first Kubernetes release of the year is here, and according to the team, is a “fit and finish” release, meaning that a lot of effort was made in improving stable and beta features. Kubernetes 1.18 includes 15 stable enhancements, 11 beta enhancements, and 12 alpha enhancements.
“Having almost as many enhancements in alpha, beta, and stable is a great achievement. It shows the tremendous effort made by the community on improving the reliability of Kubernetes as well as continuing to expand its existing functionality,” the Kubernetes team wrote in a post.
One of the major updates is that the ‘kubectl debug’ command was added to SIG-CLI. This will enable developers to easily debug pods in clusters. According to the team, the command allows developers to create a temporary container that runs next to the pod being examined and can attach to the console for interactive troubleshooting.
The Kubernetes Topology Manager has also moved to beta. This feature enables NUMA alignment of CPU and devices, enabling workloads to run in environments optimized for low latency. Prior to this feature, the CPU and device manager would allocate resources independently, sometimes resulting in undesirable allocations.
Server-side Apply is also entering its second beta. The new version will track and manage changes to fields of new Kubernetes objects.
Kubernetes 1.18 also adds two new features to Ingress. It adds the ‘pathType’ field, which allows developers to specify how paths should be matched. It also added the ‘IngressClass’ resource, which can be used to describe the type of Ingress in a cluster.
The last major addition in this version is an alpha version of CSI Proxy for Windows. This allows non-privileged containers to do privileged storage operations on Windows.
A full list of features is available here.
