Konvoy 1.3 incorporates a number of new features and capabilities that increase the flexibility, governance, and productivity of the product, while continuing to provide you with everything you need to simplify the experience of running Kubernetes on your chosen infrastructure—public cloud, virtual machines, or bare metal.
Jan 23, 2020
Andrew Atkinson
D2iQ
3 min read
On Course to Improved Flexibility, Governance, and Productivity
Since we launched Konvoy last year, we have been listening hard to you and working even harder to incorporate what we have learned into the product. Our goal, as always, is to provide you with the knowledge, technology, and support you need to achieve success in Day Two operations, so we are very pleased to announce the General Availability of Konvoy version 1.3. Konvoy 1.3 incorporates a number of new features and capabilities that increase the flexibility, governance, and productivity of the product, while continuing to provide you with everything you need to simplify the experience of running Kubernetes on your chosen infrastructure—public cloud, virtual machines, or bare metal.
Here are some of the highlights of the release:
- Air gap support: To broaden applicability beyond on-prem, AWS and other cloud provider support, we have added the ability to implement Konvoy in an air-gap setting. We have customers successfully running Konvoy in air-gapped environments both on-prem and in the cloud, combining the agility of cloud native with the security of isolation from public networks.
- Simplified Azure provisioning: you can now spin up an Azure cluster with a simple “konvoy up” command, increasing your ability to move seamlessly across platforms
- GPU support: Specialized GPU-based processors are playing an ever-increasing role in AI, machine learning and other forms of big data analytics. D2iQ has a deep history of supporting stateful workloads in the cloud native setting. With this new release, you can set GPUs within a specific node and affiliate the workloads best fitted to GPUs based on taints and tolerances. We are working on operators that take full advantage of the capabilities GPUs provide for specialized workloads and will be releasing them in coming quarters—stay tuned!
- Plan-only preview of infrastructure changes: we have added the ability to see what the infrastructure effects of provisioning changes will be before you actually make them, thus reducing the potential for unpleasant surprises or unintended consequences
- Automated custom certificate support: we have added, based on market demand, the ability to automate custom certificate support via the cluster.yaml file, strengthening the governance capabilities of the distribution
- Google Cloud support (private beta): along the same lines as the increased ease of using Azure as your infrastructure of choice, Konvoy 1.3 will enable those participating in the beta program the ability to easily provision clusters on this platform, broadening the range of options you have available for finding the best place to run your applications
- Finally, we are changing our default Kubernetes version to 1.16, to incorporate all the great additions that have been made to core Kubernetes and to better support KUDO
Of course, we subjected this release to our intensive and extensive Mixed Workload Testing regimen, which it passed with flying colors:
- 500 master and 2500 executors of Jenkins
- 1000 concurrent Spark jobs launched via 50 operator instances.
- Terasort benchmark in ~22 minutes
- 4.6+ m Kafka messages per second with 300+M over life of test
- ~260K writes/second on Cassandra with the expectation we can easily reach 1m writes/second
There are a number of other additions, as well, including integration of OPA Gatekeeper for policy management and a preview of improved Istio service mesh integration. These additions are all directed toward reinforcing our original vision for Konvoy: Konvoy is a CNCF Certified Conformance Kubernetes Distribution that is designed to be easy to use, with a single command to get a cluster up and running. Konvoy is built using upstream Kubernetes combined with all other required technologies and add-ons such as networking, storage, monitoring, logging, lifecycle management, using best of breed open source CNCF technologies. Konvoy comes with operational and security leading practices, testing, and support for all of those technologies, and it works on virtual, bare metal, and public cloud infrastructure.
We will continue to listen hard and work harder to ensure that we are providing you with the best possible way of achieving cloud native success. For more information on Konvoy, please take advantage of our 90-day evaluation license.
