CoreOS Tectonic 1.5.5 Now Ships with Highly Available Clusters by Default and Extends Installer

• By Mackenzie Burnett

Today, we are thrilled to announce the latest release of CoreOS Tectonic, which includes the ability to deploy highly available Kubernetes 1.5.5 clusters in existing infrastructure for AWS and bare-metal environments. Along with this release, we are including preview availability for running Tectonic on Microsoft Azure and OpenStack. The additional platforms provide flexibility and choice to enterprises looking to easily use Kubernetes, setting them on a path for success with cloud native technologies. And, to support enhancement and adoption of the installer, the Tectonic Installer will be released in open source to the Kubernetes community over the coming weeks.

What’s new with the Tectonic Installer

Tectonic delivers a fully supported Kubernetes platform in addition to the key enterprise capabilities that make it easy to manage and upgrade. This provides companies with the confidence to move their apps into production. Now with the Tectonic Installer, companies can look forward to:

Environment flexibility : An improved, scriptable installer makes it easy to deploy highly available (HA), secure Kubernetes clusters by default. Repeatable across environments, users can try out customizations for their environments. Includes increased customization of networking and VPC options (including deploying into an existing VPC and subnet) and custom tagging for AWS resources.

HA deployment options : Installing a highly available Kubernetes cluster is now as easy as specifying how many worker, controller, and etcd nodes you want. We ship with etcd v3 by default, giving you the latest in performance capabilities of etcd. For AWS, the Tectonic installer takes care of spreading them evenly across AZs in whichever region you specify.

Simplified deployment : With the preview installer released in open source, users now have options to deploy Kubernetes on a multitude of cloud providers.

Automated install: With the need for dev clusters, test clusters, QA clusters, and more, the installer allows users to save time and automate the install of their clusters.

Expanded platform support in preview availability

Today, we are also introducing new options for Tectonic installation on Azure and OpenStack. The Tectonic Installer for these two platforms are in preview availability and are built so organizations can customize the Tectonic Installer, version control the configuration, and build repeatable deployments. These two new platforms installers are available on GitHub today and we look forward to working with the wider Kubernetes community to make Tectonic's self-hosted style of Kubernetes install super easy on all cloud platforms.

Delivering more self-driving capabilities

Since our previous release of CoreOS Tectonic, we have shipped some notable features as we make our way down the path of delivering self-driving Kubernetes. Tectonic v1.5.5-tectonic.2 delivers Kubernetes version 1.5.5, which comes with Dex, Flannel and Console as components controlled by CoreOS’s experimental Operators.

As yesterday’s security vulnerability announcement shows, the ability to quickly upgrade clusters to the next secure patch of software is incredibly important for keeping infrastructure secure. Within hours of the security vulnerability being announced, CoreOS was able to ship a new release of Tectonic with Kubernetes 1.5.5 to our users.

Those users who enabled our experimental Operators and are running Tectonic v1.5.2.-tectonic.2 and above will be able to use Tectonic’s automatic upgrade functionality to upgrade their clusters to this latest release. For those users running Tectonic v1.5.2-tectonic.2, see these instructions on how to upgrade your cluster. For those users running Tectonic v1.5.3-tectonic.1 and Tectonic v1.5.4-tectonic.1, navigate to the Cluster Settings page of your Tectonic Console and click “Check for updates” to apply the update.

Tectonic Console is growing up

In addition to Tectonic Installer, we’re proud to announce that Tectonic Console has reached v1.0.0! This milestone comes with a number of new features, including:

Improvements to the side navigation, edit menus, and labels

Displaying node selectors and providing an editing modal

Improvements in Kubernetes and Tectonic channel statuses and error messages

Try Tectonic today with new tutorials

You can start using Tectonic today for free up to 10 nodes. For help getting started with CoreOS Tectonic, use our new set of hands-on tutorials. Tutorials are now available here to provide general education on Tectonic and Kubernetes.

For more version details, see the release notes.

Join a webinar on April 5 at 10 AM PT to learn more about the new features in Tectonic and see a demo.

Join us at CoreOS Fest

CoreOS Fest is coming to San Francisco this May 31 and June 1. Come be a part of the containerized applications and Kubernetes conversation. Join us on Pier 27 for two days of talks, panels and chats on how the community is building, running and securing distributed applications. Register today!

Interested in hosting your own meetup, or want to learn more about getting involved with the CoreOS Community? Email us at community@coreos.com.