Latest Cloud Native Updates: Docker Sale, Kubernetes 1.18 Features, Top Projects

Industry News

Docker sold its enterprise business to Mirantis, transferring the Docker Enterprise platform, related intellectual property, about 300 of its 400 staff, 750 enterprise customers and all partner relationships.

Red Hat released the open‑source Project Quay container registry, which includes a suite of Apache‑2.0‑licensed software and operates under a maintainer‑committee governance model; links to the project website and GitHub repository are provided.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 opened in San Diego on 18 November.

Upstream Kubernetes Changes (1.17‑1.18)

New sidecar mechanisms were introduced:

PreSidecars start before regular containers but after init containers, allowing preparation before the main process begins.

PostSidecars start after regular containers to perform tasks such as CSS updates or log forwarding.

Kubectl v2 addresses client/server version skew, adds API‑extension support, integrates with tools like jq, provides standard Unix CLI patterns (xargs, find‑exec, globbing), and preserves configuration comments and structure.

The IP address type is split into distinct IPv4 and IPv6 types, deprecating the original type (invalid for new EndpointSlices in 1.17 and fully removed in 1.18).

A new flag --show-enable-metrics-for-version enables re‑registration of hidden metrics.

Watch handling now uses context cancellation instead of the deprecated http.CloseNotifier, reducing goroutine usage, especially for HTTP/2 connections.

On Windows, Containerd now correctly mounts the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file when managed by kubelet.

The service controller adds node event handlers to speed up load‑balancer backend synchronization.

Client certificates can be reloaded from disk automatically when the underlying files change, ensuring new connections use updated credentials.

Knative eventing components are being serverless‑ified, with ongoing research into control‑plane scalability for Kubernetes.

Open‑Source Project Recommendations

Terway CNI – Alibaba Cloud’s container network plugin supporting VPC and ENI.

Antrea – VMware’s OVS‑based Kubernetes networking solution.

KubeSphere – An application‑centric, multi‑tenant container management platform built on Kubernetes, now GA.

CRI Resource Manager – A Kubernetes CRI proxy that provides hardware‑aware workload placement policies.

Weekly Reading Recommendations

“Learning Concurrent Reconciling” – explains how Kubernetes controllers reconcile resources to reach the desired state.

“Not Understanding OpenShift Means You Can’t Talk Cloud Computing!” – a comic‑style introduction to OpenShift and related products.

“Is Docker in Trouble?” – examines whether Docker’s perceived decline is based on evidence or hype.

“Go Beginner’s Guide” – a translated, open‑source effort to make Go learning accessible to Chinese readers.

“How to Reduce Envoy Memory Overhead in an Istio Service Mesh?” – discusses the cumulative memory impact of sidecar proxies and optimization strategies.

“The Service Mesh: What Every Software Engineer Needs to Know…” – insights from William Morgan, creator of Linkerd, on the current state of service meshes.