The latest version of the Kubernetes container orchestration system, Kubernetes 1.16, brings improvements related to customization and extensibility, container storage management, the metrics registry, and Windows container support. In addition, the new release removes a number of deprecated API versions.
What’s new in Kubernetes 1.16
Kubernetes 1.16, released in September 2019, contains the following new and revised features:
- Custom resource definitions (CRDs), the long-recommended mechanism for extending Kubernetes functionality introduced in Kubernetes 1.7, are now officially a generally available feature. CRDs have already been widely used by third parties. With the move to GA, many optional-but-recommended behaviors are now required by default to keep the APIs stable.
- Many changes have been made to how volumes are handled. Chief among them is moving the volume resizing API, found in the Container Storage Interface (CSI), to beta.
- Kubeadm now has alpha support for joining Windows worker nodes to an existing cluster. The long-term goal here is to make Windows and Linux nodes both first-class citizens in a cluster, instead of having only a partial set of behaviors for Windows.
- CSI plug-in support is now available in alpha for Windows nodes, so those systems can start using the same range of storage plug-ins as Linux nodes.
- A new feature, Endpoint Slices, allows for greater scaling of clusters and more flexibility in handling network addresses. Endpoint Slices are now available as an alpha test feature.
- The way metrics are handled continues a major overhaul with Kubernetes 1.16. Some metrics are being renamed or deprecated to bring them more in line with Prometheus. The plan is to remove all deprecated metrics by Kubernetes 1.17.