Kubernetes 1.13 Simplifies Cluster Management

Kubernetes 1.13 is now GA. It simplified the cluster management with its focus on stability and extensibility of Kubernetes.

This is the fourth and final release of 2018 for the Kubernetes project. The previous generally available release was 1.12.

Major Features

The major features in Storage and Cluster Lifecycle are part of this generally available release. The three major features are,

Storage

Container Storage Interface (CSI) is now part of Kubernetes 1.13 release. It appeared as an alpha in v1.9 and as a beta feature for Kubernetes 1.10. CSI enables third-party storage providers to write plugins that interoperate with Kubernetes. It helps in avoiding and isolating Kubernetes core code changes while developing storage plugins. Another notable feature in storage includes Topology Aware Volume Scheduling which is now marked as stable. This feature allows schedulers aware of a Pod’s volume’s topology constraints, such as zone or node.

Raw block device using persistent volume source is graduating to beta. This makes raw block devices (non-networked) available for consumption via a Persistent Volume Source.

Simplified cluster management

Kubeadm is now officially generally available. Kubeadm handles the bootstrapping of production clusters on existing hardware and configuring the core Kubernetes components. It allows new node management in the cluster and cluster upgrades. You can now easily install kubernetes 1.13 using kubeadm.

CoreDNS as the default DNS

Written in Go language, CoreDNS is now officially replacing kubedns as the default DNS server and recommended DNS solution for Kubernetes. CoreDNS is a general-purpose, authoritative DNS server for Kubernetes. KubeDNS will no longer be supported after the next release of kubernetes.

Availability

Kubernetes 1.13 can be downloaded from GitHub.