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Mohan Atreya

Amazon EKS v1.28 Cluster Provisioning using Rafay

In our recent release, we added support for new EKS cluster provisioning based on Kubernetes v1.28.

Kubernetes v1.28

Customers have shared with us that they would like to provision new EKS clusters using new Kubernetes versions so that they do not have to plan/schedule for Kubernetes upgrades for these clusters right away. For the last few releases, we have introduced support for new cluster provisioning for the new Kubernetes version first and then follow up with support for zero touch in-place upgrades.

Important

Please review our support matrix for additional details on supported Kubernetes version by provider and k8s distribution.

Intelligent Cluster Autoscaling with Karpenter

Congratulations to the maintainers of the Karpenter project!

The Karpenter project graduated to beta on 1st Nov, 2023. This is a major milestone for the Karpenter project.

We were very early adopters of Karpenter and have collaborated extensively with our customers and AWS to ensure that Karpenter works seamlessly for their EKS clusters when used with the Rafay Kubernetes Management platform. In this blog, we will describe the benefits of Karpenter and how our customers use Karpenter with Rafay.

AWS Karpenter

Rafay at DevOpsCon 2023 in New York City

In late Sep 2023, we had the opportunity to speak, present and participate at DevOpsCon 2023 in New York City. In this blog, we will briefly describe what we presented at the conference and our observations about the event itself.

DevOpsCon is a global conference focused on CI/CD, Kubernetes Ecosystem, Agile & Lean Business. If you live outside the United States, you may want to attend one of their conferences in other cities such as Munich, Singapore, London and Berlin.

This year's conference in New York was held at the Marriott near Brooklyn Bridge which is a fantastic location, literally right across from the Brooklyn Bridge and NYU Engineering.

Our goals at this conference were very simple.

  1. Educate the attendees about various approaches for secure access to Kubernetes clusters and their pros/cons.

  2. Attend other sessions, meet practitioners and learn about their challenges and how they are solving these.

View the full conference schedule.

In-place Upgrades to Amazon EKS v1.27 Clusters using Rafay

In our recent release, we added support for in-place upgrades of your EKS clusters provisioning based on Kubernetes v1.27.

Our customers have shared with us that they would like to provision new EKS clusters using new Kubernetes versions so that they do not have to plan/schedule for Kubernetes upgrades for these clusters right away. As a result, we generally introduce support for new cluster provisioning for the new Kubernetes version first and then follow up with support for zero touch in-place upgrades.

Note

Organizations that wish to perform sophisticated checks for API deprecation etc are strongly recommended to use Rafay's Fleet Operations for Amazon EKS.

Kubernetes v1.28 for Rafay MKS

Our recent release update adds support for a number of new features and enhancements. This blog is focused on support for Kubernetes v1.28 with Rafay MKS (i.e. upstream Kubernetes for bare metal and VM based environments).

Both new cluster provisioning and in-place upgrades of existing clusters are supported. As with most Kubernetes releases, this version also deprecates and removes a number of features. To ensure there is zero impact to our customers, we have made sure that every feature in the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform has been validated on this Kubernetes version.

Kubernetes v1.28 Release

Provision New AKS v1.27 Clusters using Rafay

Azure recently added support for Kubernetes v1.27 for AKS clusters. Customers can now use Rafay to provision new AKS clusters based on Kubernetes v1.27 as well.

This version of AKS was Generally Available (GA) starting July 2023 and go end of life in July 2024 i.e. with a 12 month support runway.

Kubernetes v1.27

Note

Customers have shared with us that they would like to provision new AKS clusters based on new Kubernetes versions so that they do not have to plan/schedule for Kubernetes upgrades for these clusters right away. For the last few releases, we have introduced support for new cluster provisioning for the new Kubernetes version first and then follow up with support for zero touch in-place upgrades.

CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes using Rafay

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark for Kubernetes consists of secure configuration guidelines especially for Kubernetes infrastructure set-up. These benchmarks encapsulate best practice security recommendations for configuring Kubernetes to support a strong security posture. The CIS Kubernetes Benchmark is written for the open source, upstream Kubernetes distribution and intended to be as universally applicable across distributions as possible.

In this blog, we describe how our customers perform CIS benchmark scans of their fleet of Kubernetes clusters using Rafay.

HashiCorp's New License

Last week, HashiCorp announced that they would be adopting the Business Source License for future releases of its products. In this blog, we describe how and if this impacts Rafay customers.

There is no impact to our mutual customers and users due to this recent license change by HashiCorp.

Many of our customers benefit from our native support of HashiCorp product offerings, such as Terraform and Vault, and our strong partnership ensures that they will continue to do so. In this blog, I'll describe these integrations, and provide more detail on the recent licensing change.