UPDATED 09:36 EDT / SEPTEMBER 29 2017

CLOUD

Kubernetes 1.8 release beefs up container security

The developers of the Kubernetes container orchestration software have just put out another new release. The main focus of the new version, Kubernetes 1.8, is on improving the platform’s security, and it comes with a number of new features designed to bolster this.

The release was announced in a blog post by Eric Chiang, a software engineer at container software company CoreOS Inc. who heads up the Kubernetes auth special interest group that leads the project’s development. Containers allow applications to be run the same across multiple computing environments.

“The momentum within the community continues to grow as organizations embrace Kubernetes as the leading platform for container orchestration, and this release continues the Kubernetes community’s commitment to security and extensibility with work on stabilizing existing features, even as new ones are added,” Chiang said in the post.

Kubernetes 1.8 comes with a long list of new features and upgrades, but the most exciting of these is probably the stable release of role-based access controls, which provides administrators with direct control over which applications and users can access the Kubernetes application programming interface. RBAC was previously only available in beta, though CoreOS mentioned that it has supported the feature as part of its commercial Kubernetes platform Tectonic since version 1.3.

Another important security feature now available in beta is “advanced auditing,” which was initially released in Alpha in Kubernetes 1.7. Advanced auditing is a new tool that does what the name suggests, enabling advanced auditing of Kubernetes clusters to promote better security.

The latest release also introduces Workload APIs in beta, which provides the abstractions necessary for users to manage applications deployed on Kubernetes. Chiang said these application program interfaces provide powerful new capabilities for application developers to build modern microservices-based apps, allowing to them determine what actions they can take and reason about their own permissions.

The full list of updates and features in Kubernetes 1.8 can read in the release notes over on GitHub. CoreOS said that it’s planning to update its Tectonic platform to incorporate Kubernetes 1.8 “soon.”

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