Kubernetes 1.6 Brings New Scalability and Stability

BERLIN—Every release of the open-source Kubernetes container management and orchestration system has been led by a Google employee, until the release of the latest version, Kubernetes 1.6, which was led by CoreOS software engineer, Dan Gillespie. 

Kubernetes 1.6 officially became available on March 28, providing users of the open-source container system with a new release focused on stability and scaleability. Gillespie joined CoreOS as part of the October acquisition of Redspread, which is a company he co-founded.

In a video interview with eWEEK at the CloudNative Con / Kubecon event in Berlin, Gillespie provides some insight into the Kubernetes release management process and details some of the new features that are part of the Kubernetes 1.6 release.

While there was some pre-defined processes from Google in place for Kubernetes release management,  Gillespie commented that there were some things that were previously done in an ad hoc manner that needed to be formalized.

"We definitely had to figure things out, but a lot of the core roles already existed, they just weren't formalized," Gillespie said.

A key focus for the Kubernetes 1.6 release was on stability to help improve the overall reliability of the platform. A key part of the release is the etcd 3.0 open-source distributed key-value store which was integrated into the Kubernetes 1.6 update, providing improved scale.

Another improvement cited by Gillespie is the Container Runtime Interface (CRI). Previously Kubernetes did not make it easy for users to change container engines and had assumed that Docker would be the default.

"It (CRI) is a generic way to address a container agent," Gillespie said. "This allows you to swap out container engines."

Watch the full video with  Dan Gillespie above.