Developers behind the Kubernetes container orchestration project have pushed out their first major update of the year.

The version 1.10 release comes with notable enhancements to its storage, security and networking capabilities. Kubernetes is the most popular orchestration software for application containers, which are used by developers to build applications that can run on any hardware or operating systems. Kubernetes is used to simplify the management of these containers, allowing developers to get them up and running in just a few clicks.

Storage upgrades

One of the most significant updates has to do with the Container Storage Interface, which is now in beta. CSI makes it easier to install new plugins from third parties that have been built outside Kubernetes’ core codebase. Essentially an application programming interface between Kubernetes and storage systems providers, CSI allows for a consistent runtime experience regardless of what storage is used.

Also now available in beta is nonshared local storage management. This makes storage that’s not connected to the network available to use as a persistent storage volume. In turn, that enables better performance and lower costs for distributed databases and file systems.

It’s also possible now to manage persistent storage volumes to prevent the deletion of content that’s currently being used by a container “pod.” Eric Chiang, a senior engineer at CoreOS Inc. who announced the release, said this helps to maintain the correct order of storage API objects, which is an important capability if more enterprises are to adopt Kubernetes.

“This is a powerful capability that allows developers to provide highly customized behaviors to Kubernetes clusters that return very different kinds of resources than the core Kubernetes APIs provide,” Chiang wrote. “This can be especially valuable for use cases where custom resource definitions, the primary Kubernetes extension mechanism, may not be fully featured enough.”

Security and networking

On the security side, developers have added something called external credential providers to the “kubectl” command line interface that’s used to run commands against Kubernetes clusters. The update means cloud providers and developers can now introduce binary plugins to take care of authentication for specific identity and access management services.

Meanwhile, Kubernetes has also added CoreDNS as a beta domain name system provider.

Growing up fast

The release is yet another sign of Kubernetes’ rapidly growing maturity, according to its ecosystem partners.

“This is more evidence of the reality that Kubernetes is maturing nicely, and that recent releases are not dominated by any single large feature, but are rather built from a steady improvement of many components governed by mostly autonomous teams,” Bich Le, chief architect and co-founder of Platform9, wrote in another blog post.

Another sign of Kubernetes’ maturity was provided by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which houses the project. Kubernetes recently became the first CNCF project to be moved from “incubation” status to “graduation.” The CNCF said it made this decision thanks to Kubernetes’ “thriving adoption,” its well-structured governance and its commitment to the open-source community.

Image: Kubernetes Project