Highlights

  • Highlights for the week ending September 10, 2021

    Apps

    NGINX IC v2.2.0 upgrades to upstream v1.0.0. This is a breaking change! From this version on, only clusters with kubernetes >= 1.19 are supported. The support for Ingress Object in networking.k8s.io/v1beta is being dropped and manifests should now use networking.k8s.io/v1. Please make sure to read the upgrading notes. (#218).

    cert-manager v2.10.0 Upgrade to upstream v1.5.3. This is the first version compatible with Kubernetes 1.22.

    User interfaces

    There is a new Installed Apps view in the Apps tab on the Cluster detail page.

    kubectl-gs v1.39.0 offers a new template organization command for templating Organization CRs.

  • Highlights for the week ending August 27, 2021

    Apps

    Kong v2.3.0 upgrades to upstream chart v2.3.0, which includes Kong v2.5.0 and Kong Ingress Controller v1.3.0. Warning: Breaking change for Kubernetes clusters older than v1.16.x. Please check “Breaking Changes” paragraph in the upstream changelog.

    NGINX IC v2.1.0 upgrades to controller container image v0.49.0.

    User interfaces

    For single sign-on users, we removed the “Helm stable” catalog from the Apps section in the web interface. To make up for it, we drastically improved the loading performance, as all catalog data is now fetched from the Management API.

    kubectl-gs as of v1.36.0 offers an additional flag --callback-server to the login command. If you had trouble with a local firewall or similar before, please consider using this new flag to specify the inbound port to use. This also makes usage in a Docker container easier. Example:

    docker run -p 8080:8080 -ti --rm \
      -v $HOME/.kube:/root/.kube \
      quay.io/giantswarm/kubectl-gs:1.36.0 login \
      --callback-port 8080 \
      https://g8s.your-installation-domain/
    
  • Highlights for the week ending August 20, 2021

    Apps

    Cert Manager v2.9.0 upgrades to upstream v1.4.2, deprecating v1alpha2, v1alpha3, and v1beta1 versions of cert-manager.io and acme.cert-manager.io :warning: If you are upgrading the app on a cluster with Cert Manager upstream < v1.0.0 (Giant Swarm v2.2.5), please make sure Cert Manager CRDs do not reference deprecated APIs. Read upstream release notes.

    External DNS v2.5.0 upgrades to upstream v0.9.0, bringing small improvements and bug fixes.

    User interfaces

    We are continuously adding more guides on using the Management API to the web interface, so you learn to do what you do interactively via a CLI.

    Documentation

    Our new article on observability apps gives you an overview about what we have in store regarding monitoring, logging, graphing and even service mesh.

  • Highlights for the week ending August 6, 2021

    General

    The unique, immutable cluster identifier formerly called the cluster ID is now called the cluster name, and what was called name is now called description. The goal here is consistency between our user interfaces and the Management API. Likewise for node pools.

    Management API

    On AWS, for all cluster-related custom resources we now use version v1alpha3 as the one stored in etcd and the default version served by the Kubernetes API. If you want to obtain the v1alpha2 version, with kubectl you can specify the version like this:

    kubectl get clusters.v1alpha2.cluster.x-k8s.io x1234 -o yaml
    

    Apps

    Linkerd2 v0.6.0, our managed service mesh offering, is now available as an app in the Giant Swarm Catalog. To try it, please read the documentation.

    Prometheus Operator v0.10.0 is upgraded to upstream Kube Prometheus Stack v17.0.3 and now contains prometheus-operator v0.49.0, prometheus v2.28.1 and alertmanager v0.22.2.

    We’ve also improved the monitoring of the managed apps Prometheus Operator, Loki, and Cert Manager for better quality.

    User interfaces

    Deleting a cluster via the web interface (happa v1.15.0) now requires additional confirmation steps, to make sure you are deleting the cluster you want to delete.

    Also in the web interface we start explaining how to achieve via the Management API what you’re doing in the UI. This is only available when using single sign-on (SSO).

    In kubectl gs v1.34.0, the template app command provides options to specify annotations and labels to be applied to an app’s target namespace. Check out the docs for the new flags --namespace-annotations and --namespace-labels.

  • Highlights for the week ending July 23, 2021

    Documentation

    Our CRD docs now feature deprecation info. On the list, there is a DEPRECATED tag. On the details pages, there is a box with details. In cases where the CRD is directly replaced by another one, this info is given in the box.

    Dashboards

    The KVM resource usage dashboard has been added to Grafana.

  • Highlights for the week ending July 16, 2021

    Managed apps

    NGINX IC v2.0.0 is upgraded to controller container image v0.48.1. It contains performance improvements related to the admission webhook. Potentially Breaking change: For security, it disables forwarding traffic to ExternalNameServices by default. To enable it please check the details in the changelog.

    Prometheus Operator v0.9.0 uses giantswarm/config to generate managed configuration. This is part of a larger story to automate the configuration management of installations.

    User interfaces

    In kubectl gs v1.32.0, Catalog CRD replaces AppCatalog CRD, enabling organization-wide (rather than ‘global’), namespace-scoped, app catalogs.

    Documentation

    With release v15.0.0 for Azure you can now specify which external IP address to use for egress traffic of workloads, and we just added documentation for this feature.

  • Highlights for the week ending July 9, 2021

    Managed apps

    We released loki v0.3.0 and promtail v0.3.0 with improvements related to observability and stability of both apps

    User interfaces

    The web interface now features a Monitoring link, as we already mentioned in separate announcement.

    kubectl gs template apps now provides a new flag --app-name to set the name of the app instance. The command also produces much cleaner templates by default.

    Documentation

    To provide for a really simple start with using our App Platform, we added a new Getting started with App Platform guide where you can learn how to deploy apps to your clusters in a declarative way.

  • Highlights for the week ending June 25, 2021

    General

    As we aim to align our terminology with the Kubernetes project where possible, we started replacing the term master node with control plane node in our communication and user interfaces.

    Managed apps

    EFK v0.5.4 adds an option to clean stale lock files in an init container. This addresses some cases when lock files are not cleaned up automatically (when NFS is used for storage) and Elasticsearch cannot start.

    EFK v0.5.3 adds support to override the Kibana image registry, increasing flexibility. For example, allowing customers to install their own plugins, set default configs, etc.

    Documentation

    There is a whole new page on authentication for the Management API you might want to check out.

    We also added documentation on encrypting persistent volumes using Azure Key Vault.

  • Highlights for the week ending June 18, 2021

    General

    As we aim to align our terminology with the Kubernetes project where possible, we started replacing the term master node with control plane node in our communication and user interfaces.

    Managed apps

    Loki v0.2.0 comes with upstream version 2.2.1. You can now use an existing secret (such as sealed secrets) for configuration, making the app more flexible. Please note that there is a manual intervention required when upgrading to this version. Check the release info for details.

    Kong v2.1.0 is upgraded to upstream chart v2.1.0. We anticipate some Kong issues customers have been facing to be fixed by upgrading.

    NGINX IC v1.17.0 updates the controller container image to v0.47.0.

    External DNS v2.4.0 is upgraded to v0.8.0.

    User interfaces

    kubectl gs as of v1.28.0 offers two new commands: get appcatalogs and get apps.

  • Highlights for the week ending June 06, 2021

    Management API

    On AWS (as on Azure) it is now possible to scale down node pools to zero nodes.

    User interfaces

    We fixed issues related to preparing for providing Management API access. These include correcting the chart name when installing an app and adding a missing import in the ingress installation step. We also upgraded the ws dependency to address a security vulnerability.

    Documentation

    We wrote an article on Organizations, as defined in the Management API. These replace the organizations as used with the REST API. Please read the details of this transition carefully to understand the ramifications for you and your end users.

    These weekly announcements now also appear in the Changes and Releases section, as their own category named Highlights.

This part of our documentation refers to our vintage product. The content may be not valid anymore for our current product. Please check our new documentation hub for the latest state of our docs.