Today Kubernetes released its third major release of 2020 with Kubernetes 1.20. This release has a massive 44 enhancements. Of the 44, 11 have graduated to stable, 15 enhancements are moving to beta, and 16 enhancements are entering alpha.
Today Kubernetes released its third major release of 2020 with Kubernetes 1.20. This release has a massive 44 enhancements. Of the 44, 11 have graduated to stable, 15 enhancements are moving to beta, and 16 enhancements are entering alpha.
Kubernetes exploded on the scene about 5 years ago and has been going strong ever since. To date, Kubernetes is the most popular open-source container orchestration system. We’ve seen Kubernetes get adopted at an incredible rate and has a seat at the table of all the big vendors now. Kubernetes 1.20 follows in the footsteps of the other major releases, once every 11 weeks. The biggest exception this time is the amount of the enhancements and the number of Alpha and Stable enhancements.
What’s New in Kubernetes 1.20
One of the major aspects of this release is that volume snapshot operations has gone stable. This feature is said to provide a standard way to trigger volume snapshot operations and allows users to incorporate snapshot operations in a portable manner on any Kubernetes environment and supported storage providers. These snapshots are the initial steps to developing application or cluster level backup for Kubernetes.
Kubectl debug has graduated to Beta. Kubectl debug is said to provide support for common debugging workflows directly from kubectl. Troubleshooting benefits supported in the new release include the following:
- Troubleshoot workloads that crash on startup by creating a copy of the pod that uses a different container image or command.
- Troubleshoot distroless containers by adding a new container with debugging tools, either in a new copy of the pod or using an ephemeral container. (Ephemeral containers are an alpha feature that is not enabled by default.)
- Troubleshoot on a node by creating a container running in the host namespaces and with access to the host’s filesystem.
- Note that as a new built-in command, kubectl debug takes priority over any kubectl plugin named “debug”. Users will need to rename the affected plugin.
Other enhancements of Kubernetes 1.20 include:
- API Priority and Fairness – introduced in 1.18, Kubernetes 1.20 now enables API Priority and Fairness (APF) by default. This allows kube-apiserver to categorize incoming requests by priority levels.
- IPV4/IPV6 Update – IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack has been reimplemented to support dual-stack services based on user and community feedback. This allows both IPv4 and IPv6 service cluster-IP addresses to be assigned to a single service and also enables Service to be transitioned from single to dual IP stack and vice versa.
- Process PID Limiting for Stability – After being enabled-by-default for a year, SIG Node graduates PID Limits to GA on both SupportNodePidsLimit (node-to-pod PID isolation) and SupportPodPidsLimit (ability to limit PIDs per pod).
- Graceful node shutdown – The GracefulNodeShutdown feature is now in Alpha. GracefulNodeShutdown makes the kubelet aware of node system shutdowns, enabling graceful termination of pods during a system shutdown.
- RuntimeClass and Built-in API Types Defaults graduated to stable.
Availability
Kubernetes 1.20 is available now through GitHub.
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