Changes and Releases

Updates on Giant Swarm workload cluster releases, apps, UI improvements and documentation changes.

  • Changed

    • Bump karpenter-app to v0.14.0.
  • Highlights for the week ending 2024-11-28

    Observability

    • logging-operator version 0.16.0

      • Introducing enhanced visibility with Kubernetes events logging in Alloy, allowing for better monitoring of your environments.
      • Improved security by adding support for Private Certificate Authorities (CAs) in Alloy logs.
      • More control with the new events-logger option, enabling tailored logging settings through the observability-bundle ConfigMap.
      • Simplified management with the Grafana-Agent configuration now templated, and user privacy respected by disabling usage data reporting.
      • Enhanced reliability with improved logging configuration tests.
    • prometheus-rules version 4.27.0

      • Get precise alerts with new rules distinguishing between production and non-production clusters, ensuring focused monitoring.
      • Expanded monitoring capabilities with new alerts for critical components like cloud-provider-controller, cilium, coredns, and vertical-pod-autoscaler-crd.
      • Improved alerting for system reliability, including Shield pod restarts and Mimir ruler failures.
      • Enhanced usability with fixes to dashboard links and more robust template testing.

    Continuous deployment

    • app-exporter version 1.0.0
      • Gain deeper insights with a new cluster_id field in app metrics, enhancing traceability by linking metrics to specific clusters.
      • Aligned with the latest standards by removing outdated Kubernetes support, simplifying your configuration for modern environments.
      • Streamline your deployment processes with updated pipeline tools and simplified Helm values.
      • Ensure consistency and reliability in your deployments with updated label values and the removal of unnecessary dependencies.

    Docs

    We’re excited to announce the launch of our new Docs Hub, featuring up-to-date documentation for the Giant Swarm platform, now fully ready for Cluster API. While we’ve preserved our vintage documentation in a dedicated folder for reference, all content in the general documentation section is now accurate and current. We are committed to expanding and enhancing our documentation further in the coming weeks, and we warmly welcome all customer feedback to help us improve and complete our resources.

  • Changed

    • Use Phase instead of Status field for Clusters and Nodepools. Affected commands:
      • kubectl gs get clusters
      • kubectl gs get nodepools

    Fixed

    • Fix getting nodepools via kubectl gs get nodepools.
    • Remove node classes from vsphere template used in kubectl gs template cluster command.
  • Changes compared to v29.0.0

    Apps

    • cert-exporter from v2.9.2 to v2.9.3
    • observability-bundle from v1.6.2 to v1.8.0

    cert-exporter v2.9.2…v2.9.3

    Changed

    • Chart: Enable global.podSecurityStandards.enforced. (#420)

    observability-bundle v1.6.2…v1.8.0

    Changed

    • Upgrade prometheus-agent from v0.6.9 to v0.7.0.
      • Adds extraArgs to be able to use nice features like wal truncation
    • upgrade kube-prometheus-stack from 61.0.0 to 65.1.1
      • prometheus-operator CRDs from 0.73.0 to 0.75.0
      • prometheus-operator from 0.75.0 to 0.77.1
      • prometheus upgraded from 2.53.0 to 2.54.1
      • grafana from 8.2.0 to 8.5.0
      • thanos ruler upgraded from 0.35.1 to 0.36.1
      • prometheus-node-exporter upgraded from 1.8.1 to 1.8.2
    • Add missing depends on annotation on alloy-metrics and alloy-logs to make sure they are deployed after the prometheus-operator-crds.
    • Upgrade alloyLogs to v0.6.1
      • Allow passing PodLogs via helm chart values
      • Upgrade to Alloy v1.4.2 which fixes a bug with component reload/evaluation and keeping Alloy up-to-date
      • Fixes an issue with CiliumNetworkPolicy preventing Alloy to run in clustering mode
  • Highlights for the week ending 2024-11-21

    Observability

    • Alloy app version 0.7.0

      • We’ve upgraded the Alloy base chart to version0.10.0, bringing Alloy itself to version 1.5.0. This update includes the latest features and improvements for enhanced performance and stability.
    • Alloy gateway app version 0.2.0

      • The Alloy gateway app now uses Alloy version 1.5.0, which includes important fixes for clustering with Cilium Network Policies.
    • Fluent log-shipping app version 5.3.1

      • We’ve fixed an issue with the fluent-bit image by adding the missing auditd libraries, enabling the use of ausearch for more comprehensive auditing capabilities.
    • Logging operator version 0.15.2

      • This update ensures compatibility with the latest Alloy logs by supporting the new secret mechanism, designed to work with Alloy 0.4.0 and the observability bundle 1.6.0. Additionally, if your deployment supports it, Vertical Pod Autoscaling (VPA) will be enabled for Alloy.
    • Dashboards version 3.26.1

      • We’ve added a new “Mimir / Continuous Test” dashboard and improved the “Management Cluster Overview” dashboard for better monitoring insights.
    • Observability bundle version 1.9.0

      • The latest bundle now includes Alloy version 1.5.0 with new event logging capabilities. We’ve also upgraded various components: alloy-logs and alloy-metrics to version 0.7.0, kube-prometheus-stack to 66.2.1, and other key monitoring tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and kube-state-metrics to their latest versions for enhanced observability.
    • Observability operator version 0.9.0

      • This release introduces new features for managing Grafana organizations, including their creation and configuration. It also addresses installation issues with the latest Alloy Metrics release and improves test reliability by updating Python dependencies and configuring required secrets.
    • Kube Prometheus stack app version 13.0.1

      • We’ve updated our chart dependencies to the latest versions, including kube-prometheus-stack 66.2.1 and Prometheus Operator 0.78.1, along with Grafana’s upgrade to 8.6.0. These updates bring improved performance and new features to your monitoring stack.

    Connectivity

    Continuous deployment

    • external-secrets version 0.11.1 * Update image version to v0.10.5 to resolve issue with failing to auth to kubernetes using client certs
    • zot version 2.0.1 * Fixed duplicate entry in ServiceMonitor resources

    Security

  • In this release:

    • Helm chart secrets were restructured;
    • PSP support was removed;
    • support for extra env vars and volumes was added.
  • In this release:

    • Backstage was updated to v1.32.5
    • Custom Kubernetes and KubernetesAuthProviders APIs were added to communicate with Kubernetes clusters from client side.
    • Custom GitHub auth provider was moved from GS backend module to backend package. See ./docs/releases/v0.42.0-changelog.md for more information.
  • Changed

    • Upgrade Alloy upstream chart from 0.9.2 to 0.10.0
      • This bumps the version of Alloy from 1.4.2 to 1.5.0
  • Changed

  • Changed

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.