Welcome to the release of Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD) versions v1.25.1, v1.24.1, and v1.23.4!
As a part of Team SIGHUP's continuous efforts to serve the community with a production-ready full-fledged Kubernetes Distribution, we continuously keep expanding and maintaining the Kubernetes Fury ecosystem to keep up with the latest upstream changes.
Let us dive together into the changes for this new version.
Highlights of KFD release v1.25.1, 1.24.1 and 1.23.4
- Three new versions were released, making available all the latest features and bug fixes to three different Kubernetes versions.
- New Distribution release
v1.25.1, certified by the CNCF, adds support for Kubernetes1.25.x. - Updated all the core modules to the latest upstream versions with bug fixes, security updates, and new features.
- We've improved the out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities of all the core modules, adding new metrics and alerts for key components of the Distribution.
- Several improvements to the logging module have been included in these releases:
- The Loki package, included as a tech preview in the previous releases, has been greatly improved and is now considered production-grade.
- A Highly Availability MinIO cluster is now deployed as part of the logging stack to store securely the logs of your cluster and applications.
- A new index is now used to better segregate the logs from the infrastructural components from the applications' logs. Lowering the noise level when searching them.
- The Monitoring module also has some new features:
- Thanos, which provides long-term storage of metrics and centralized metrics for several Prometheus instances, has been refactored to include more deployment options and updated to the latest version.
- Karma is now part of the module. Karma provides a central dashboard to monitor several instances of Alertmanager, making it easier to monitor the health of several clusters.
Certified Kubernetes 1.25
KFD now supports the 1.25 stable minor version of Kubernetes, giving you all the awesome perks from Kubernetes upstream ready to go.
Each Kubernetes Fury Distribution version is tested for conformance across all 3 supported Kubernetes versions across multiple cloud environments.
You can learn more about all the new changes in Kubernetes 1.25 in the official notes and the official changelog. There is also a very detailed blog post on the release from Sysdig that we recommend checking out.
Updated core modules
In KFD, we maintain a set of core modules based on cloud-native projects that we consider essential for a production-grade cluster.
With this new release, we have updated all the modules to the latest stable version from upstream. Including several enhancements, bug fixes, and security patches.
Following is a list of the core modules and the updates in them:
All three new versions contain the same core module versions.
Networking module v1.12.2
Kubernetes Fury Networking implements in-cluster networking functionality for the Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD) via Container Network Interface (CNI) plugins.
This new release of the Networking module updates Calico and the Tigera operator packages. It also adds some new alerts and dashboards to improve the monitoring of the networking components.
Changelog:
- Updated Calico to
3.25.0. - Updated Tigera Operator to
1.29.0.
Monitoring module v2.1.0
Kubernetes Fury Monitoring provides a fully-fledged monitoring stack for the Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD). This module extends and improves upon the Kube-Prometheus project.
This new release of the Monitoring module updates all components, includes a refactor to Thanos with several improvements, and adds Karma, a new package for monitoring several Alertmanager instances in a centralized manner.
Changelog:
- Updated alertmanager to
0.25.0. - Updated blackbox-exporter to
0.23.0. - Updated grafana to
9.3.2. - Updated kube-rbac-proxy to
0.14.0. - Updated kube-state-metrics to
2.8.0. - Updated prometheus-adapter to
0.10.0. - Updated prometheus-operator to
0.62.0. - Updated prometheus to
2.41.1. - Updated thanos to
0.30.2 - Updated x509-exporter to
3.6.0. - Updated node-exporter to
1.5.0. - Added karma in version
0.113
Logging module v3.1.3
Kubernetes Fury Logging provides a logging stack for the Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD).
This new release of the Logging module improves the OpenSearch stack with bug fixes, new features, and better out-of-the-box configuration. The Monitoring module now includes a three nodes MinIO cluster in high availability to be used as a storage backend for the centralized logging stack.
Infrastructure logs now have a dedicated index in OpenSearch Dashboards, segregating them from the logs of the applications running in the cluster and improving the signal/noise ratio when searching.
Additionally, Loki, a less resource-intensive option to OpenSearch that was previously included as a technical preview, has been greatly improved and it is now suitable for production environments.
Changelog:
- Updated opensearch-operator to
2.5.0. - Updated opensearch-dashboards to
2.5.0. - Updated logging-operator to
3.17.10. - Updated loki to
2.7.3. - Added minio-ha version
vRELEASE.2023-01-12T02-06-16Z.
Ingress module v1.14.1
Kubernetes Fury Ingress provides Ingress Controllers to expose services and TLS certificates automated management solutions.
This new release of the ingress module updates all the components to their latest version porting bug fixes and new features and adding compatibility with Kubernetes 1.25.
Changelog:
- Updated cert-manager to
1.11.0. - Updated external-dns to
0.13.2. - Updated forecastle to
1.0.119. - Updated nginx-ingress-controller to
1.5.1.
DR module v1.11.0
Kubernetes Fury DR implements backups and disaster recovery for the Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD) using Velero.
The DR module has been updated to the latest stable version of Velero, and the Velero plugins have been updated to the latest stable version as well.
Changelog:
- Updated velero to
1.10.1. - Updated all plugins to
1.6.1.
OPA module v1.8.0
Kubernetes Fury OPA provides policy enforcement for the Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD) using OPA Gatekeeper.
The OPA Module has been updated with general enhancements. We added support for Kubernetes 1.25, updated Gatekeeper including Mutation capabilities that has been promoted to stable, External Data in beta, and Introducing Validation of Workload Resources as an alpha feature. Gatekeeper Policy Manager has also been updated to its latest release and its deployment manifests have been improved to comply with Pod Security Standards in restricted mode.
Changelog:
- Updated gatekeeper
3.11.0. - Updated gatekeeper-policy-manager to
1.0.3.
Auth module v0.0.3
Kubernetes Fury Auth provides authentication components for the Kubernetes Fury Distribution (KFD).
This module, introduced in the last update round for KFD, has been updated to include the latest version of Pomerium, improving the out-of-the-box security configuration for it at the same time by restricting security context configuration and switching to a non-root container image. Pomerium now also provides metrics and dashboards out of the box.
Changelog:
- Updated pomerium to
0.21.0.
Discover more about each module by navigating to the Modules section on this site.
Upgrade paths
For the first time in this release, various upgrade paths have been identified depending on which version of Fury you are in, you can read all the paths and find the guides here.
Conclusions
Kubernetes and its ecosystem are in constant change, and it might seem hard to keep up with them. KFD's goal is to provide you with all the latest changes from the upstream projects, pre-configured with sane defaults, with versions that are tested to work well together, and taking advantage of the features provided by the rest of the components to maximize the value given to you without all the worries. We are proud to believe that these new releases are meeting this objective, and with each release, KFD gets even better.
Thank you for reading and for your interest in the Kubernetes Fury Distribution, we are happy to have you as part of our community! Come hang out with us in our Slack channel.
If you would like a demo or personalized support and consultancy on KFD or Kubernetes in general, book your slot over here.