The company behind Open Policy Agent, Styra, announced they raised $40 Million in funding today. The software, OPA for short, is capable of controlling access and managing authorization in complex environments. Among others, it comes with integration for Kubernetes environments, and allows to centrally control multiple aspects of access control.
Styra has raised a $40 million Series B funding round to continue driving the reinvention of policy and authorization for cloud-native applications.
Today Kubernetes released it’s version 1.17. The software is one of the most popular open source projects ever. It allows managing containerised applications and micro-services. The release arrives at the end of a regular development cycle.
After the project was announced in 2014 by two Google employees, it hit a first 1.0 milestone on July 2015. The project gained massive popularity in the cloud world because it enables scalable infrastructures and service. With the Kubernetes 1.0 release, Google partnered with the Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a new home for the technology.
Since Kubernetes became publicly available, it gained popularity quickly and today is commonly used as the main way to host microservice-based implementations, mostly because Kubernetes and its associated ecosystem provide a rich choice of tools with all the capabilities that are needed to address key concerns of any modern software architectures.
With Kubernetes 1.17 released today, the package comes with more details on the release in the Release Schedule or in particular on the Changelog.
Kubernetes, the container orchestration and hardware abstraction framework, reached Version 1.16. Custom Resources, Overhauled Metrics, and Volume Extensions are the mentionable new features in the new release.
We’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.16, our third release of 2019! Kubernetes 1.16 consists of 31 enhancements: 8 enhancements moving to stable, 8 enhancements in beta, and 15 enhancements in alpha.Major Themes Custom resources CRDs are in widespread use as a Kubernetes extensibility mechanism and have been available in beta since the 1.7 release. The 1.16 release marks the graduation of CRDs to general availability (GA).
Source: Kubernetes 1.16: Custom Resources, Overhauled Metrics, and Volume Extensions – Kubernetes
Open Policy Agent to manage policy for Kubernetes with GateKeeper.
Jason Haley wrote a brief tutorial to get the Pythonista started with Kubernetes. Worth reading if you are new to the topic.
So, you know you want to run your application in Kubernetes but don’t know where to start. Or maybe you’re getting started but still don’t know what you don’t know. In this blog you’ll walk through how to containerize an application and get it running in Kubernetes.This walk-through assumes you are a developer or at least comfortable with the command line (preferably bash shell).
Source: Get started with Kubernetes (using Python) – Kubernetes
Google’s Kubernetes Engine (GKE) now supports node pools that are wrapped in gVisor to allow running untrusted workloads. The idea behind gVisors is to emulate all system calls in user space and provide a sandbox to processes that cannot be trusted. GKE allows to enable this with a configuration option now.
New GKE Sandbox brings added security to your containers running in Google Kubernetes Engine clusters.
Source: GKE Sandbox: Bring defense in depth to your pods | Google Cloud Blog
Kubelet TLS Bootstrap and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) Move to General Availability – Kubernetes Blog
Author: The 1.12 Release TeamWe’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.12, our third release of 2018!Today’s release continues to focus on internal improvements and graduating features to stable in Kubernetes. This newest version graduates key features such as security and Azure. Notable additions in this release include two highly-anticipated features graduating to general availability: Kubelet TLS Bootstrap and Support for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS).
While Amazon Web Services reported another record quarter with $4,53B in October 2017, and Microsoft reporting 93% growth of their cloud business, Google is the third major player in the market for cloud services.
At the same time, Google is not (yet) explicitly reporting numbers on their cloud offering. However, “all other” businesses, including Play Store, also showed impressive 42% growth recently.
To demonstrate how serious the company is about their cloud products, Google demonstrated their commitment in roadshows, the Google Cloud Summit. Among others, like in Paris or Singapore, the Summit was held in Munich On December 6th in the MOC Munich.
Following a keynote between 9am an 11am, Google prepared 4 tracks covering diverse, cloud oriented topics in the areas of Application Development, Big Data & Machine Learning, Infrastructure & Operations, Startup. These tracks had continuous talks between 11am and 6pm, touching all topics from the field you could think of, starting with containers, docker and Kubernetes, going over IoT and Industry 4.0, touching Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, to Data Loss Protection and GDPR. All that along with Innovation and Agility in the context of security and privacy.
To round up the event, outside the track rooms had an exhibition of selected cloud partners, from consultancy to implementation service, but also SaaS offerings leveraging the Google Cloud Platform.
While the market news seem that Google is late to the game, their commitment and quality of offering surely put them in an interesting spot and an alternative to the other two cloud vendors. The cloud summit definitely answered questions on Googles capabilities.
