Deliver fully-managed clusters at scale everywhere with your own Kubernetes-as-a-Service
The Gardener release 1.4 is mainly focused on stability improvments and optimizations. For example, we twitched some configurations (e.g CPU and memory limits), and improved the monitoring and healtchechks. And there are some new features too. The list below is an overview of the most notable changes. Explore the full release notes in GitHub Release 1.4.
Previously whenever you change a configuration of your Shoot.yaml specification, a reconciliation process was triggered enabling your desired state. Now using .spec.maintenance.confineSpecUpdateRollout=true you confine those changes to be updated in the individual maintenance time window. This is helpful if you want to update your Shoot but don’t want the changes to be applied immediately. One example use-case would be a Kubernetes version upgrade that you want to roll out during the maintenance time window. It is important to note that if you change the maintenance window itself, then it will only be effective after the upcoming maintenance. Of course, there is an exception with the .spec.hibernation.enabled field, which changes are taken under consideration immediately. If you hibernate or wake-up your Shoots then Gardener gets active right away.
We exposed this Dashboard to give you insight over some CoreDNS metrics of your cluster, like: DNS Requests, DNS Lookups, Cache Hits/Misses.
The Shoot health check controller has been improved to produce error codes (if applicable) to the .status.conditions[].codes that help to categorize observed problems. Also, there are two new error codes: ERR_INFRA_RESOURCES_DEPLETED indicates that the underlying infrastructure does not have enough resources anymore, and ERR_CONFIGURATION_PROBLEM indicates that the user has misconfigured something and should double-check the specification.
CloudProfile which are still in use
The Gardener API Server now validates the changes of CloudProfile against Shoots that are using it. And will block removal of in use versions of Kubernetes and machine images from the CloudProfile. This is part of the “Gardener Versioning Policy” proposal that you can find at GEP-5
You can specify for which Kubernetes and machine image versions you can forcefully upgrade to newer ones when expired. This is part of the “Gardener Versioning Policy” proposal that you can find at GEP-5
metadata.generateName as alternative to metadata.namePreviously it was not possible to create more that 20-25 worker groups, because the number of worker’s cloud configs were limited by the size of the Secret. We divided the cloud config to dedicated managed resources to eliminate this limitation.
We introduced new common library in the extension package that will help you to develop simple validating or mutating webhooks for different K8s types with different handlers. Please have a look at PR#69 to see an implementation in action.
We bumped the already presented addon for Kubernetes Dashboard to v2.0.0
Previosuly an overlap of these networks resulted in a broken state, so we added such validation to our admission plugin.
Now, gardener checks if the Endpoints object is reconciled by kube-controller-manager, otherwise it ignores and does not block the hibernation.
If you have implemented custom extension controller for your cluster, you can vendor Gardener v1.4.0 to benefit from the fix.
The Gardenlet detects outdated health check reports on extension CRDs with a default threshold of 5 minutes in case Gardener extensions stop performing health checks. For backwards-compatibility reasons, the gardenlet does not check for stale extension reports per default. To enable, the field controllers.shootCare.staleExtensionHealthCheckThreshold in the Gardenlet configuration file should be set.
Removed the cluster overview dashboard since metrics used in this dashboard were removed. Other dashboards are changed to no longer show data on a “Pod level” since pod level metrics have a high cardinality and have been mostly removed from the aggregate-prometheus.
We now replicate the ETCD encryption into the ShootState for future restoration purposes.
We fixed a race condition that led to incomplete maintenance operations for shoot clusters and fixed a bug that prevented the Shoot reconciliation to wait for the deletion of Extension CRDs.
The Actuator interface for the Infrastructure, ControlPlane, Network, Worker, OperationSystemConfig, BackupEntry extension controllers were extended to support migrate and restore operations.
Triggering full or delta snapshots now returns metadata for the snapshot taken in the response body. Also, new endpoint was introduces for fetching details of the latest full and delta snapshots.
Green Power!The Gardener Project just got a brand new website with multiple improvements and we are all very excited!
Go ahead and explore around now and help us spread the word: https://gardener.cloud
Read more about changes and plans in the blog post.
about SAP, Gardener and OSS.Recently, Thomas Hertz, CNCF board member and head of Development Experience at SAP, published an overview article at the TheNewStack where he discusses projct Gardener and its place in SAP and the open source community, and what’s the future ahead of it.
“Gardener is an SAP-driven open source project that tackles real-world demands for hyperscale Kubernetes services, regardless of infrastructure.", Thomas says disucssing the benefits from Gardener, yielding analogy with Borg, born to address real-world problems and eventually becomming Kubernetes. Further stressing upon the project’s Kubernetes DNA he outlines the unique, vendor-neutral approach of Gardener to offer a lock-in free solution and lists a number of SAP solutions that already benefit from that far and wide.
Gardener provides a neutral toolbox for the technology stack of today, and we designed it to be sufficiently extensible so that — with relatively low effort — it can additionally adapt for the tools and infrastructures that come next. No one can say which direction the Kubernetes ecosystem will take, but Gardener is designed to keep things open and flexible.
“We are determined to be transparent with Gardener, by developing everything in the public space and then adopting it with minor SAP specific integrations in-house. It’s always been imperative to keep it vendor-neutral and to stick to upstream Kubernetes practices, design and processes." Thomas then elaborates on SAP’s comitment to transparently drive the project in vendor-neutral manner and in a trully transparent for the community community and collaborative manner.
He then discusses various use cases of community members using Gardener in differnet domains and concludes with the benefits of the open source project for SAP and how it catalizes a cultural change
Within SAP, Gardener is influencing and catalyzing change. We already have great inner sourcing examples, with internal stakeholders contributing directly to the open source software project and doing almost everything in the public.
“We developed Gardener to provide our customers with a single, consistent Kubernetes feature set that abstracts resources and underlying infrastructure, and can be used by SAP solutions anywhere. We are seeing an uptake by those developing applications and deploying them across multiple clouds, and look forward to working with the community to extend Gardener and deliver hyperscale Kubernetes services for the tools and infrastructures of the future." Thomas says at the end of the article, inviting contributors and adopters to the growing Gardener community for a collaboraiton to meet the challenges today and in future.
Read more about that in the original article at the .
Read this blog by Christoph Voigt, where he takes on head-to-head the problem of dealing with machines in the cloud.
Okay, so I can make any cloud instance part of my local cluster. But this still requires a bit of setup at the cloud vendor of your choice: at a minimum, you need to create a basic network infrastructure (VPC, subnets), create a VM (decide on an OS, setup Tailscale & K3s, assign Firewalls / Security Groups), oh, and please make sure it is running with a secure Runtime profile!
He explores the options and then settles on Gardener’s Machine-Controller-Manager as the most Kubernetes-native aproach out there. In this experiment, only MCM and not the rest of Gardener is used. And that is quite possible because of the Kubernetes and Gardener’s idiomatic loosely coupled, modular designs.
To explore how MCM was integrated and more, head on to the original blog at the blog.nativecloud.dev.
Everywhere
Homogeneous
Fully Managed
Customizable
Scalable
Cluster Fleet Hub
Kubernetes NativeFully ManagedScalable by Design
Gardener control planes allow you to control a wide range of a wide range of features gates and configurations.
No more unexpected updates! Gardener allows you to update Kubernetes to the version you want, when you want it, rather than when your cloud provider decides. It even allows you to update your Host OS when desired.
Gardener is Kubernetes native and is not shy to be completely transparent on its compliance, proudly holding the 100% badge with public evidence for that.
Gardener delivers the same Kubernetes you know from kubernetes.io and are certified for. The same binaries, the same tools; you are already trained to use it.
Gardener is a modular system of managed extensions around a robust core, fully adaptable in multiple dimensions. Extend the existing extension set or add completely new pieces. And while you are at it, why not contribute them back to the community and benefit from contributions of others?
Gardener watches over and manages extensions, automatically reconciling their actual and desired state as designed.
You are in control of the setup for the cluster that will be delivered by Gardener. Choose the components you actually need.
