Canonical announced full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.19 spanning from public cloud to the edge, covering Charmed Kubernetes, MicroK8s and kubeadm.

“As with all releases, Canonical is committed to fast following so that users benefit from the latest features, lifecycle operations and enterprise support in line with the upstream. With Kubernetes 1.19, MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes also bring enhanced security and carrier grade features. Certification management, IPv6 and SR-IOV are all added across any infrastructure, whether used in development or production,” commented Alex Chalkias, Product Manager at Canonical.

MicroK8s, the lightweight, zero-ops, opinionated Kubernetes is ideal for users that look for K8s on-rails. With support for Intel and Arm chips, MicroK8s is suited for edge environments and IoT use cases. MicroK8s 1.19 comes with new versions for add-ons such as Istio 1.5.1, Prometheus 2.20 and K8s dashboard 2.0. The Multus add-on is now generally available to handle multiple networking Kubernetes plugins simultaneously and the Ambassador add-on provides an API gateway to handle traffic between heterogeneous services. Users of the latest stable MicroK8s track will be automatically upgraded to 1.19.

Charmed Kubernetes is best suited for enterprises looking to streamline their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud production environments by providing elastic K8s with declarative, lifecycle operations.  Enterprises running critical production workloads such as telco and retail will benefit from new additions to Charmed Kubernetes 1.19. The latest version is now able to handle more fast networking scenarios with SR-IOV, IPv6 support and security is enhanced with the addition of CIS (Centre for Internet Security) benchmark compliance.

What’s new?

All upstream Kubernetes 1.19 features are available in MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes. Additionally, users benefit from the following new features in Canonical’s distributions:

MicroK8s

• New add-ons generally available:
  • Multus
  • Ambassador
  • “host-access” for reaching host’s services

• Ingress support for UDP and TCP as well as configurable SSL certificates
• Allow for user-provided CA
• MetalLB support for ranges and CIDR notation
• Registry improvements
  • Discovery support
  • Configurable size
• Add-on version updates:
  • Istio v1.5.1
  • Dashboard v2.0.0
  • Linkerd v2.8.0
  • MetalLB v0.9.3
  • Fluentd v3.0.2
  • Prometheus v2.20.0

Charmed Kubernetes

• IPv6
• SR-IOV
• CIS benchmark compliance
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS support