Kubernetes becomes more scalable, gets support for hybrid clouds

Earlier this week, Google released version 1.3 of Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration software.

The release brings support for deploying services across “multiple clouds (including on-prem), support for multiple node types, integrated support for stateful services (such as key-value stores and databases), and greatly simplified cluster setup and deployment on your laptop. Now, developers at organizations of all sizes can build production scale apps more easily than ever before,” Aparna Sinha, a product manager at Google, wrote in a blog post announcing the release.

Kubernetes is powering Core OS’ Tectonics, a Kubernetes distribution to manage containers running on Core OS. Red Hat is also using Kubernetes in its PaaS solution OpenShift, which is becoming a central piece of the Linux vendor’s container strategy.

Highlights of the new release include: 

• The biggest feature of the new release is scalability of clusters. Customers can autoscale clusters while doubling the maximum number of nodes per cluster.
• A new cross-cluster service discovery allows containers and external clients to resolve services even if they are running fully or not in other clusters.
• There is now a new “PetSet” object that preserves hostnames between restarts. You can also create persistent storage disks that live beyond the life of the container.
• Kubernetes 1.3 introduces Minikube, which enables developers to start a Kubernetes cluster on their local machines with just one command. Since that local cluster is API compatible with a full Kubernetes cluster, they can work locally and then push changes to production clusters.
• Kubernetes 1.3 now natively supports Container Network Interface (CNI) and Google plans to add support for Open Container Initiative (OCI). Customers can also use Core OS’s rkt runtime which is integrated with kubelet.
• Customers can now use the GUI dashboard to control, edit and create all workload resources, without having to resort to CLI (command line interface).

Google said that over 800 people contributed to the new release, which is available for download on GitHub.