Guest: Grace Nguyen (LinkedIn)
Organization: CNCF (Twitter)
Show: Newsroom

Kubernetes formally announced the release of version 1.28 containing 45 enhancements, 19 of which are entering Alpha, 14 have graduated to Beta, and 12 have graduated to Stable.

In this episode of TFiR: Newsroom, Kubernetes 1.28 Release Lead Grace Nguyen talks about the state of Kubernetes today and some of the enhancements that are included in this release. She also reflects on the lead role that she took on 2 years ago.

Kubernetes releases:

• Over the past couple of years, there has been an explosion of Kubernetes usage across organizations of all sorts and sizes. Creating and releasing new features to a project that is used by literally millions of people needs to be well-orchestrated.
• Each enhancement or feature goes through stages: alpha, beta, and general availability (GA) or stable.
• Alpha and beta can be gated under a feature flag that you have to manually turn on, but they have to be in two different releases to make sure folks can put in their feedback. As they progress, they get more testing.
• Sometimes, features are no longer needed, like a deprecation of dockershim. That goes into Deprecation stage for a few releases and then actually removed from the project (Removal).

Notable features in this v1.28 are:

• Expansion of the supported skew between the version of the control plane and the node version from 1 to 3, because it’s easier for folks to upgrade their control plane than it is to update their node.
• API awareness of sidecar containers (Alpha).
• Non-graceful node-shutdown support, i.e., when a node shuts down unexpectedly, pods can be airlifted to a healthy node to give the cluster more availability. (Stable)
• Expanded domain name system (DNS) config, i.e., more DNS and longer DNS search path. (Stable)

On long-term support (LTS):

• Obviously, vendors and users want to continue to use the version that they’re using and be able to upgrade at their own pace. The problem is that there are not enough resources to maintain 10 versions back. It’s very much a conversation in the community between balancing what the users want and what we can afford as maintainers.

On generative AI:

• There is conversation going on between Special Interest Group (SIG) Docs folks and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) about leveraging generated AI to create documentation, which Nguyen thinks will be a big help. If folks are going to KubeCon in Chicago, she predicts a rise in generative AI talk.

On her experience as Release Lead:

• Nguyen is a student who will be graduating next year from the University of Waterloo.
• As Release Lead, Nguyen had full creative control of the theme, which is Planternetes. She says it is not only a nod to her love of plants, but also a great metaphor for the Kubernetes community — so diverse, yet each of one plays an important role in creating and maintaining this ecosystem.
• The role has been an amazing learning opportunity for her. She got to run a large, diverse team, which included industry veterans who have been doing this for 10-20 years, as well as folks like her who are students and newcomers to open source.
• Seeing everyone literally from all over the globe and coming together to create things that the rest of the world can use for free is truly meaningful. No matter where they come from, no matter who they work for, they all have this one common goal.
• Working on the Release Team for over 2 years gave her an understanding of the community and the importance of communication.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.