What’s New?
AWS EKS 1.19 Upgrade & 1.16 Deprecation
Kubernetes is rapidly evolving with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. The Kubernetes 1.19 release sees Ingress API and Pod Topology Spread reaching stable status, EndpointSlices being enabled by default, and immutable Secrets and ConfigMaps. Find out more about Kubernetes version 1.19 in the project release notes.
Kubernetes version 1.16 will no longer be supported as of July 25, 2021. On this day, you will no longer be able to create new 1.16 clusters and all existing EKS clusters running Kubernetes version 1.16 will eventually be updated to the latest available platform version of Kubernetes version 1.17.
Amazon EKS provides support for at least 4 Kubernetes versions at any given time. Kubernetes 1.17, 1.18, 1.19, 1.20 are all fully supported by EKS today, and new clusters can be started using any of these releases. However, given the Kubernetes quarterly release cycle, it is critical for all customers to have an ongoing upgrade plan. Amazon EKS 1.21 is due for release in July 2021.
Learn more about EKS here.
Terraform v1.0 General Availability
Terraform by HashiCorp is now 1.0 GA, marking a major milestone for interoperability, ease of upgrades, and maintenance for infrastructure automation workflows. Terraform state is now cross-compatible between versions 0.14.x, 0.15.x, and 1.0.x. Remote state data source compatibility is now back-ported to support versions 0.12.30, 0.13.6, 0.14.0, 0.15.0, and 1.0.x.
All Terraform 1.x releases will have a maintenance period of at least 18 months. This means HashiCorp will continue to investigate bugs and release features for the 1.0 release for at least that long.
Starting with Terraform 0.15 and continuing through the lifecycle of 1.x, you can now upgrade to a new Terraform version and your workflows will continue to be operational, just as they were in those prior versions.
Amazon MSK
Amazon MSK is a managed service that makes building and running applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data easier. Apache Kafka is an open-source platform for building real-time streaming data pipelines and applications.
Kafka clusters are challenging to set up, scale, and manage. You need to provision servers, configure Apache Kafka manually, replace servers when they fail, orchestrate server patches and upgrades, architect the cluster for high availability, ensure data is durably stored and secured, set up monitoring and alarms, and carefully plan scaling events to support load changes.
Amazon MSK makes it easy for you to build and run production applications on Apache Kafka without needing Apache Kafka infrastructure management expertise. It continuously monitors cluster health and automatically replaces unhealthy nodes with no downtime to your application and secures your Apache Kafka cluster by encrypting data at rest. You spend less time managing infrastructure and more time building applications.
Learn more about Amazon MSK here.
Grafana Tempo v1.0 General Availability
Grafana Tempo is an open source, easy-to-use and high-volume distributed tracing backend. Tempo is cost-efficient, requiring only object storage to operate, and is deeply integrated with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki.
Distributed tracing visualizes the lifecycle of a request as it passes through a set of applications. There are a few components that must be configured in order to get a working distributed tracing visualization.
Tracing is one of the three pillars of modern observability. Unlike other tracing backends, Tempo can achieve massive scale without a difficult-to-manage Elasticsearch or Cassandra cluster. Tempo supports search by trace id only.
Learn more about Tempo in this webinar.
Have you seen our Cloud Environment Maintenance Schedule? Even for an environment that never changes, it will still require maintenance.
This maintenance schedule lays down, what we believe to be, a comprehensive list of tasks to be performed on any setup over the course of 12 months based on their importance, and how frequently they change.
Useful Reading
Docker For Beginners
https://docker-curriculum.com/
Learn to build and deploy your distributed applications easily to the cloud with DockerKubernetes Goat
https://madhuakula.com/kubernetes-goat/index.html
Kubernetes Goat is an intentionally vulnerable cluster environment to learn and practice Kubernetes security