Everybody’s favourite container orchestration platform, Kubernetes, got 31 enhancements this week in its first new release of 2019.

Crucially, Kubernetes 1.14 graduates support for Windows containers from beta to stable, “officially” bringing the platform from Linux to Windows.

That means that enterprises with applications running on both Operating Systems no longer need to install and operate separate orchestrators.

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Kubernetes, originally built by Google, and one of the most popular projects on GitHub, with over 6,500 contributors, has become the go-to way of automating container-based application deployment, scaling, and management, but has thus-far been Linux-centric.

With companies increasingly moving to microservices-based architecture, containers – a way to separate an app from its underlying environment – are rapidly becoming the default approach to manage enterprise application estates.

They have a lower overhead in terms of memory footprint and efficiency than “traditional” hypervisors that support VMs in most datacentres and allow users to deploy apps quickly and reliably anywhere, regardless of environment.

Kubernetes Windows Support

The Kubernetes release team said late Monday: “Up until now Windows Node support in Kubernetes has been in beta, allowing many users to experiment and see the value of Kubernetes for Windows containers.”

“Kubernetes now officially supports adding Windows nodes as worker nodes and scheduling Windows containers, enabling a vast ecosystem of Windows applications to leverage the power of our platform,” the Kubernetes team said Monday.

“Enterprises with investments in Windows-based applications and Linux-based applications don’t have to look for separate orchestrators to manage their workloads, leading to increased operational efficiencies across their deployments, regardless of operating system,” the open source project’s team said.

Fresh Kubernetes 1.14: support for Windows Server 2019 for worker nodes and containers; support for out of tree networking with Azure-CNI, OVN-Kubernetes, and Flannel; improved support for pods, service types, workload controllers, and metrics/quotas to closely match the capabilities offered for Linux containers.

Other enhancements include CustomResourceDefinition (CRD) OpenAPI support. This enables client-side validation, schema explanation and client generation for CustomResources and covers the gap between CR and native Kubernetes APIs, which already support OpenAPI documentation, Canonical noted.

Red Hat was among those welcoming the release. The company’s Derek Carr said in a blog: “This is the culmination of a tremendous amount of work over the past year across a number of Kubernetes Special Interest Groups (SIGs) including Windows, Node, and Architecture… Red Hat congratulates Microsoft and the extended community for reaching this significant release milestone.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu OS, added that it was enabling full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.14, using kubeadm deployments, Charmed Kubernetes, and MicroK8s, its single-node deployment of Kubernetes.

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