VSHN.timer #74: Kubernetes 2021

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

We’re going to start 2021 with a review of some of the latest news on the world of Kubernetes.

1. The biggest news last month was the release of Kubernetes 1.20, including many new features, the most important of which was without any doubt the deprecation of Dockershim. These news were somehow misinterpreted by the community as a deprecation of the whole container concept, and even Kelsey Hightower had to intervene to provide some clarity. In short: you should only be concerned if your workflow requires talking to the Docker socket /var/run/docker.sock, in particular for „Docker in Docker“ type of scenarios. Otherwise, your Dockerfiles and all your containers are still valid and good to go!

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/12/02/dont-panic-kubernetes-and-docker/

2. Kubernetes 1.20 brought many other features: volume snapshot operations on supported providers; kubectl debug available in beta; reimplementation of the IPV4/IPV6 dual stack; and graceful node shutdowns, available in alpha for the moment. The official release announcement has more information about these changes.

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2020/12/08/kubernetes-1-20-release-announcement/

3. Deploying to Kubernetes remains a complex experience for newcomers to the platform; in particular, getting your YAML right can take a few tries. To solve this issue, the nice people at Shipa have created Ketch, to deploy your applications to Kubernetes without YAML. Saiyam Pathak from Civo wrote a tutorial to learn how to use it.

https://www.civo.com/learn/deployments-without-yaml-using-ketch

4. Unbeknownst to many, kubectl has an extensive and very useful plugin architecture. Arthur Busser from Padok published a fantastic article with all the information you need to know to not only use plugins, but also recommending some cool ones to install.

https://www.padok.fr/en/blog/kubectl-plugins

5. The tool of the week is the k3d extension for Visual Studio Code, allowing you to spin new clusters directly from your preferred editor.

https://github.com/inercia/vscode-k3d

Are you going to migrate to Kubernetes 1.20? Do you use kubectl plugins? Would you like to share some cool kubectl plugins with the community? Get in touch with us through the form at the bottom of this page, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

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PS³: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about Kubernetes: #4, #8, #11, #14, #16, #19, #23, #37, #46, #49, #59, and #64.