With all the interest in the Kubernetes community we saw at the OpenStack Summit, we want to keep you up to date with all the goings-on. Let’s highlight the most notable changes and achievements of the last few weeks.

Kubernetes 1.7 is on the way

Perhaps the most important item to highlight is the upcoming Kubernetes 1.7 release. Kubernetes releases are scheduled for every three months, so development has been underway since just after KubeCon EU at the beginning of April, and the release team has been completely formed. The Kubernetes 1.7 release team includes members from multiple companies, including Google, CoreOS, Mirantis, Red Hat, Microsoft and others. The release is due to ship at the end of June. Stay tuned!

Focus on features

And what is a release without new features? The focus for Kubernetes 1.6 was on stability and not so many notable new features, but rather more hardened existing ones. (You can get more information about Kubernetes 1.6 from the KubeCon EU keynote by Aparna Sinha, Product Manager at Good.) By contrast, the focus for Kubernetes 1.7 is on new features, and today more than 50 features are targeting Kubernetes 1.7.

Most of these new capabilities will be initially launched as alpha features with limited stability and API compatibility, and will be continuously improved over time.

While the code freeze won’t happen until June 1 and the list of the features hasn’t been finalized, we already know that huge enhancements are expected, especially in the Federation, Security, Networking and other areas; stay tuned for further issues to read more about it.

Kubernetes at the OpenStack Summit

The latest OpenStack Summit in Boston was notable because of the high volume of Kubernetes-related talks and discussions. Dozens of Kubernetes-related talks were on the schedule during the four-day event. Several keynotes were even dedicated to the significant role that Kubernetes claims in OpenStack world.

Yet another notable event at OpenStack Summit was Kubernetes Day. This event, organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation was one of the OpenStack Summit’s Open Source Days and had a goal to be a Kubernetes-specific track at OpenStack Summit. Luckily, this event was more than successful, including 7 presentations and covering multiple topics, with almost full venues and huge attendee interest.

All this confirms the role that Kubernetes has in the OpenStack ecosystem. While OpenStack solves the questions of infrastructure abstraction in a completely open-source way, Kubernetes does the same for the application services abstraction layer.

Improving Kubernetes itself with less pain

There are numerous options for running a Kubernetes cluster locally, whether you’re interested in development, testing, or “just-trying it out”. These include projects such as minikube, kubeadm or kargo.

Most of these options are focused on the “development-on-kubernetes” experience, and there is a lack of tools that are focused on bringing the “development-for-kubernetes” experience. The Kubernetes community is considering a new proposal for running local Kubernetes clusters for development purposes has gone live. The project, named kubeadm-dind-cluster, incorporates the best developer practices and experiences when it comes to provisioning and running Kubernetes local clusters for developing Kubernetes itself.

The Kubernetes Community Code of Conduct

After the resolution of some issues that had been reported by Kubernetes people, the Kubernetes Code of Conduct has been announced and presented. You can find the mailing list thread with the situation description and Code of Conduct announcement here.

It’s important to note that the community is serious when it comes to enforcement; in a somewhat extraordinary situation, an abuser has been “kicked off” the Kubernetes community, including revoking Kubernetes Slack, Kubernetes mailing lists, GitHub org-level access and others based on conduct that occurred prior to his joining the project. While he is still able to jump back, this request will be under deep investigation.

The establishment of a Code of Conduct is a great step towards the project maturity. Having this form of public agreement protects individuals and the whole community from unexpected abuse incidents, and allows people to focus on their contributions.

Coming up

The next few weeks will be productive for the Kubernetes community as well. Several public community events, including CoreOS Fest in the USA and Container Days in Hamburg, Germany, will happen soon, and we will keep you updated here.