Kubernetes v1.12.2

We are excited to announce the availability of Kubernetes v1.12.2 for your clusters that are running in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. With the Kubernetes service, you can easily upgrade your clusters without the need for deep Kubernetes knowledge. When you deploy new clusters, the default Kubernetes version remains 1.10; you can also choose to immediately deploy version 1.12. Learn more about deploying clusters here.

What does containerd mean for my clusters?

For clusters that run Kubernetes version 1.11 or later, containerd replaces Docker as the new container runtime for Kubernetes to enhance performance. If your pods rely on Docker as the Kubernetes container runtime, you must update them to handle containerd as the container runtime.  Review the docs for additional information about containerd and to determine if your apps may rely on docker instead of containerd.

Kubernetes v1.12

In addition to all the great Kubernetes features provided in this release, the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service v1.12 update also includes the following:

• Increased availability with HA masters

• Ability to select KubeDNS (default) or CoreDNS as cluster DNS provider

• Ability to scale the number of Kubernetes Dashboard pods

• Heapster replaced by metrics server as cluster metrics provider

• containerd updated to version 1.2.0

• Beta-release of new IPVS type cloud provider load balancer

See the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service version 1.12 changelog for details. 

Kubernetes support and updates

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service now supports the latest four versions of Kubernetes: 1.9, 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12. Clusters that are running Kubernetes versions 1.8 and earlier are unsupported. Clusters running 1.9 will soon be deprecated with an end-of-support date of December 7, 2018.  It is important to note that clusters that run unsupported Kubernetes versions cannot receive security updates or support until they are updated to a supported version.  Review the potential impact of each Kubernetes version update, and updateyour clusters immediately to version 1.10 or later.

Have questions?

For general questions, engage our team via Slack by registering here and join the discussion in the #general channel on our public IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service Slack.