Canonical now provides full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.21 includingMicroK8s, Charmed Kubernetes and kubeadm. This updated support spectrum highlights an ongoing commitment to Kubernetes, and the enterprise’s increasing investment in the space, according to the company. 

Canonical also committed continued support for N-2 releases and extended security maintenance and patching for N-4 releases in the stable release channel. Customers now can get new features and product updates for all upstream supported versions as well as access to extended security updates from Canonical for versions no longer supported by the upstream. This aligns with all major cloud providers for enterprise hybrid cloud Kubernetes deployments. 

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Alex Chalkias, product manager for Kubernetes at Canonical, said in a blog post announcing the news that the goal is to remove complexity around Kubernetes operations from the cloud to the edge.

“We bring certified Kubernetes distributions to allow users to bootstrap their Kubernetes journey, as well as a large tooling ecosystem and automation framework combination, for businesses to reap the K8s benefits and focus on innovation in the growing cloud-native landscape,” Chalkias said.

SEE: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players (TechRepublic)

The company announced that all upstream Kubernetes 1.21 features are available in MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes. MicroK8s is a lightweight, zero-ops, conformant Kubernetes for edge and IoT deployment. The company announced these MicroK8s 1.21 highlights from the release:

• New OpenEBS add-on for container attached storage 
• New OpenFaaS add-on for serverless development 
• GPU support is now offered via the NVIDIA operator 
• Kubectl “microk8s kubectl apply -f” deployments now work with local files on Windows and MacOS
• Update to support distributions with iptables-nft
• Support for remote builds 
• Version updates for Containerd, CoreDNS, Fluentd, Helm, Ingress, Jaeger, KEDA, Linkerd and Prometheus

Charmed Kubernetes 1.21 highlights from the release include:

• CoreDNS operator
• Kubernetes dashboard operator
• Calico eBPF support
• Conformance with CNTT guidelines

The company listed these features as the most notable from the update:

• Memory manager that guarantees memory allocation via a dedicated QoS class
• Scheduler features to allow developers to define nominated nodes for workloads and node affinity into a deployment
• ReplicateSet downscaling that includes two new strategies: Semi-random and cost-based to  remove the need for manual checks before downscaling a deployment
• Indexed job to simplify deploying highly parallelizable workloads into Kubernetes 
• Network policy port ranges that allows a single network policy to be applied to a range of ports
• Depreciation of pod security policy in this release and plans to remove it completely in Kubernetes 1.25 

The full list of changes is on the changelog.

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