Canonical, the firm behind the Ubuntu operating system, has announced full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.21. It said that support ranges from public cloud to edge and covers Charmed Kubernetes, MicroK8s, and kubeadm. According to Canonical, MicroK8s is suited for workstations, DevOps, edge and IoT, Charmed Kubernetes is aimed at multi-cloud clusters, and kubeadm is designed for manual operations.
Notable changes in Kubernetes 1.21 include a memory manager which will improve the performance of some applications, new scheduler features, improvements to ReplicateSet downscaling, support for indexed jobs, and the deprecation of Pod Security Policy before its complete removal in Kubernetes 1.25.
Commenting on the launch of Kubernetes 1.21, Canonical Product Manager Alex Chalkias said:
“Canonical Kubernetes is about removing complexity around Kubernetes operations from cloud to edge. We bring certified Kubernetes distributions to allow users to bootstrap their Kubernetes journey, as well as a large tooling ecosystem and automation framework combination, for businesses to reap the K8s benefits and focus on innovation in the growing cloud-native landscape. Our users benefit from the latest features of Kubernetes, as soon as they become available upstream.”
Enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu is provided by Canonical as a part of the Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure (UA-I) support subscription. The package includes long-term security maintenance, kernel Livepatching, and mission-critical infrastructure support for the full stack from the kernel to the container across public clouds, Vmware, OpenStack, and bare metal.
In terms of product releases from Canonical, this month is turning out to be a bit busy. On the first day of the month, Canonical launched Ubuntu 21.04 beta and is intending to release the finished product on April 22.