Kubernative by Palark | Kubernetes news and goodies

Headlamp GUI got a plugin for Argo CD A few days ago, Headlamp, a Kubernetes web UI developed by the Kubernetes SIG and recommended as a successor to the Kubernetes Dashboard, got another prominent plugin: for Argo CD. It adds native views for Argo CD resources in the dashboard. It already supports Applications and AppProjects, can show a GitOps summary (source/destination, revision, health, etc.), managed resources, sync policy and history, and more. However, it's still in alpha, which comes with numerous limitations (i.e. it can't fully replace the original Argo CD UI). Find more details and screenshots about this plugin on its 0.1.0-alpha release page. P.S. Last year, Headlamp also got a plugin for another well-known GitOps tool, Flux. It is still actively developed, with its most recent version 0.7.0 released just two weeks ago. #news #gitops #gui #releases

Community has met KYAML, a strict subset of standard YAML for Kubernetes (KEP-5295), with mixed feelings. However, it will become stable in the upcoming Kubernetes v1.37 release. Thus, yesterday’s Kubernetes blog post on what KYAML is and how to use it* may be helpful. * TL;DR: via kubectl -o kyaml or yamlfmt (from Kubernetes itself or Google). #articles

New free Kubernetes workshop Konrad Heimel announced the Kubernetes Practitioner Workshop, a GitHub repo that offers structured educational content for engineers looking to learn Kubernetes concepts and practice them. It comes with: - 28 topics (e.g., Containers, StatefulSet, The operator pattern, or Helm), each presented with 20-30 slides and accompanied with a practical lab requiring 15-30 minutes to complete; - two types of environments for labs: a specific namespace on a shared cluster or a local kind cluster; - downloadable PDFs provided as GitHub releases; - facilitator guide with additional notes on setting up the required environment and running this workshop. All content is free and available as Open Source (under the Zero-Clause BSD permissive license). #career

What to expect in Kubernetes v1.37 The next Kubernetes release, v1.37, is scheduled later this month, on August 26th. It will come with several important deprecations (e.g., static Pods won't longer reference Secrets/ConfigMaps, the ipvs mode will be removed from kube-proxy) and over 20 new features, including Recreate update strategy for StatefulSets, volume health monitor, default Pod sysctls in Kubelet, CompositePodGroup API, and others. Learn more about these upcoming changes from the first related articles published last week: - Kubernetes 1.37: Deep dive into new alpha features on Palark tech blog; - Kubernetes v1.37 Sneak Peek on the official Kubernetes blog. #news #articles #releases

Thought of running agents on Kubernetes more efficiently? Here’s a project from Google that you might find useful. Agent Substrate is an experimental system for running agents and similar workloads on Kubernetes at scale, providing specialised scheduling and controls to improve scalability and reduce latency. It relies on Kubernetes Pods and Pod autoscaling (but not K8s control plane) and manages the lifecycle of "actors" (agents or similar apps): creating and destroying them, assigning them to Pods, and routing traffic to them. It handles OCI containers at the kernel level via gVisor, so it can work with apps that are built on any stack. ▶️ GitHub repo Language: Go | License: Apache 2.0 | 912 ⭐️ #tools

OpenTelemetry got a one-command Linux setup The OpenTelemetry Packaging SIG introduced a ready-to-use opentelemetry package for Linux distributions that installs the OpenTelemetry Injector together with the OpenTelemetry SDKs and auto-instrumentation packages for various programming languages (Java, .NET, Node.js, and Python). It is now available as an APT repository (for Debian, Ubuntu, and derivatives) and a YUM repository (for Fedora, RHEL, and derivatives). Find more details in this announcement or read the full instructions on GitHub. #news #observability

Kubeflow became a CNCF Graduated project The summer series of CNCF level-ups keeps going, and Kubeflow has just joined the list of the organisation’s most mature (i.e. Graduated) projects. The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted for this graduation last Friday. Kubeflow is a machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes that serves as a foundation for K8s-based AI platforms. Its subprojects include Pipelines for end-to-end ML workflows, Trainer for distributed AI model training and LLM fine-tuning, Katib for AutoML, and a Kubernetes operator for Apache Spark. Kubeflow originated in Google, with its first public announcement in 2017. It was accepted into the CNCF as an Incubating project in July 2023. Today, its adopters include Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Cisco, Huawei, IBM, NVIDIA, Red Hat, and Tencent. #news #cncfprojects #aiml

Confidential Containers became a CNCF Incubating project Another level up has just happened in the CNCF, with its TOC accepting moving Confidential Containers to the Incubating level. This project enables confidential computing by leveraging hardware-based TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) to protect containers and data by encrypting data during computation. Confidential Containers started in 2021 by Red Hat, Intel, IBM, and other companies. It was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in March 2022. Today, this technology is used in IBM LinuxONE, Red Hat OpenShift, Kubermatic KubeOne, Alibaba Cloud, and several other solutions. #news #cncfprojects #security

KubeSchool by Portainer As Neil Cresswell, CEO of Portainer, said on Reddit, one of his engineers recently asked him to help better understand Kubernetes architecture and components. Answering this request, he decided to go bigger and launched KubeSchool. It's an educational website featuring 15 chapters on Kubernetes basics for beginners. They cover the core ideas behind K8s, its main components, pluggable layers (CNI, CSI, CRDs, etc.), and production-ready recommendations. #career #articles

Buildpacks graduates, k8gb incubates Following the CNCF TOC votes that happened over the last weekend, two CNCF projects were promoted to the next level: 1. Buildpacks, a set of specifications and tooling that transform application source code into container images that can run on any cloud, became a Graduated project. It was started by Pivotal and Heroku in January 2018, joined the CNCF Sandbox in October 2018, and became Incubated in November 2020. The companies that adopted Buildpacks include Bloomberg, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Salesforce, and VMware by Broadcom. 2. k8gb, a Kubernetes global balancer, became an Incubating project. It originated in Absa Group in 2019 and joined the CNCF Sandbox in March 2021. Current k8gb adopters include Eficode, Millennium bcp, and PagBank. #news #cncfprojects

HAMi became a CNCF Incubating project HAMi was originally known as k8s-vGPU-scheduler and today stands for Heterogeneous AI computing virtualisation Middleware. It enables slicing a physical GPU into units by memory/core/device count, enforcing hard runtime isolation, and scheduling Pods using binpack, spread, and topology-aware policies. You can learn more about this project from this overview. HAMi joined the CNCF Sandbox in August, 2024. Two weeks ago, the CNCF TOC voted to promote it to the incubating level. This change was formally announced yesterday. #news #cncfprojects

William Rizzo, a CNCF Ambassador and Global Field CTO at Mirantis, announced his project, KubeSwift, which provides Kubernetes-native VM orchestration on Cloud Hypervisor. Here’s the idea behind KubeSwift: “KubeSwift runs virtual machines as Kubernetes workloads. You define a VM with a custom resource; controllers reconcile it into a Pod; inside that Pod, swiftletd launches a hypervisor.” (Cloud Hypervisor, on which this project relies, is a VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) for cloud workloads written in Rust.) While still being in the pre-1.0 state, KubeSwift already supports disk boot from cloud images and direct kernel boot from OCI artifacts, Multus and OVN-Kubernetes for networking, exposing guest ports as Kubernetes Services, GPU passthrough, disk snapshots, offline and live migrations, managing fleets of identical VMs, swiftctl CLI tool for lifecycle management and operations, and many other features. ▶️ GitHub repo Language: Go | License: AGPL 3.0 | 18 ⭐️ #news #tools

Our latest digest of the prominent software updates in the Cloud Native ecosystem: 1. Argo CD (a CNCF Graduated project) released its v3.5 RC, introducing several important features. They include a new ApplicationSet UI with built-in change previews, Impersonation workflows and Source Hydrator promoted to Beta, Helm 4 support, and mTLS support for repo-server. Currently, v3.5.0-rc1 and v3.5.0-rc2 are available, with the GA release scheduled for August. 2. Headlamp, a Kubernetes web UI developed by the Kubernetes SIG, released 0.43.0. It came with ClusterProfile discovery (alpha), a node upgrade visualisation panel, proxy auth support for middleware proxies, a Create Deployment form in the UI, a dedicated Job details view, RTL layout support, and several new localisations. 3. Podman, a tool for managing OCI containers and pods (a CNCF Sandbox project), reached v6.0.0. It significantly upgraded the network infrastructure (iptables → nftables; CNI networking → Netavark; slirp4netns → Pasta; experimental Pesto rootless port forwarding), improved VM experience in Podman Machine with easier operations across different providers and a new podman machine os update command, enhanced quadlet capabilities and the way configuration files are handled. 4. CloudNativePG, a platform designed to manage PostgreSQL in Kubernetes (a CNCF Sandbox project), released 1.30.0, featuring the DatabaseRole CRD for declarative role management as its main highlight. This release also added a Kubernetes Lease object for safe primary election, in-place major upgrades with Image Volume extensions, PgBouncer image management via Image Catalogs, SCRAM-SHA-256 password encoding, and several other improvements. 5. Dragonfly, which implements secure data distribution and acceleration powered by P2P (a CNCF Graduated project), announced v2.5.0. It introduced direct repository downloads from Hugging Face and ModelScope, a Kubernetes mutating admission webhook for automatic P2P capability injection in Dragonfly, a blocklist to disable specific downloads, comprehensive rate limiting, a new command-line tool (dfctl) to manage tasks in the client’s local storage, and many other updates. 6. Flux (a CNCF Graduated project) released 2.9 with a new CLI plugin system and the first two plugins (Mirror and Schema). It also included Server-Side Apply field ignore rules for fine-grained drift control, enhanced secrets decryption, support for Helm post-render strategies, CEL-based health check expressions, and many other new features. The latest release of Flux Operator added a dedicated workload dashboard and a full-featured Pod log viewer to the Flux Web UI. 7. cert-manager (a CNCF Graduated project) released v1.21.0 with experimental ACME Renewal Information (ARI) support, AWS IAM authentication for Vault, certificate renewal policies, support for Modern2026 PKCS#12 profile, Venafi OAuth token observability, runtimeClassName support, and various Gateway API and cainjector improvements. #news #releases

Minimus introduced free hardened container images At the end of June, Minimus Community Edition was announced. This project made “hundreds of continuously built from source, near-zero CVE container images” freely available. There are images and Helm charts, all classified by the following categories: Apps, Base, Data, Dev, Infra, and Utils. Some of them feature validated FIPS, CIS, NIST SP 800-190, and STIG compliance. You can find the full catalog here. #news #security

Upbound introduced Modelplane for AI inference The company behind Crossplane, a CNCF project that graduated at the end of 2025, announced its new Open Source project called Modelplane. The CNCF's CTO already mentioned on LinkedIn that this project would be a great fit for CNCF. Basically, Modelplane is a control plane for AI inference built on Crossplane, which allows you to run any model on any serving engine on any infrastructure. Here's its brief description from the official announcement: Modelplane sits above your inference clusters and operates them as one inference platform, reconciling the whole fleet toward the state you declare. It does for the fleet what Kubernetes does for the cluster: platform teams and developers describe what they want as Kubernetes resources, and Modelplane composes the clusters, places the models, and exposes the endpoints to match. Additional resources include the getting started documentation and the GitHub repo. #news #tools #aiml

Sharing our latest selection of interesting Kubernetes-related articles recently spotted online: 1. "Kubernetes In Anger" by Samuel Vijaykumar Madireddy. This guide is not for beginners. There’s a gap between knowing Kubernetes concepts (pods, deployments, services, kubectl) and actually being able to keep an EKS cluster healthy in production. [..] What you will find: what to do when pods are Pending and you don’t know why, how to tell if DNS is the problem or just a symptom, why your NLB keeps resetting connections, and how to collect evidence before the cluster auto-heals and destroys your ability to do an RCA. 2. "What kubectl debug doesn’t tell you: The silent evidence gap" by Shamsher Khan. A kubectl debug session can contain the only direct observation of a failing system state. [..] Once the pod state changes, the Kubernetes API no longer exposes the termination context of that debug session. The exit code that encoded your finding, the duration of the session, which container you targeted — is not retained by the Kubernetes API after subsequent pod updates. Here is what that looks like, and what it means for your incident response workflow. 3. "Static web hosting on Kubernetes with OCI images as volumes" by Kowalski7cc. Introduced in Kubernetes 1.31, promoted to beta in 1.33 and entered in stable with Kubernetes 1.36, we can use OCI images as volumes for containers. They are now a possible storage choice among Persistent Volume Claims, empty directory, pod metadata, Config Maps and Secrets. This option can take advantage of the existing tooling and CI/CD already present to deliver an archive containing any kind of data. 4. "Kubernetes Gateway API" by Roman Glushko. We have covered a lot of ground here. We traced the evolution of Kubernetes ingress patterns from the early days of Kubernetes to the Gateway API era. Then we stopped at Gateway API and went deeper into the protocol itself. [..] Finally, we looked at available Gateway API implementations and how to think about picking one. 5. "Kyverno in Action: Policy-as-Code Admission Control for Kubernetes" by Sergei Olshanetski. In this article, we’ll build a complete Kyverno demo on Minikube. We’ll start with an open cluster, layer on one policy at a time, and end with a hardened production baseline that includes Cosign image signature verification, automated tenant onboarding, and TTL-based cleanup. Every step runs on your laptop. 6. "The feedback loops behind Kubernetes" by Fatih Arslan, PlanetScale. Before we look at a single line of Kubernetes, we're going to run a production database by hand and slowly let the feedback loop appear on its own. Then we'll map that loop to Kubernetes, with the pieces production needs: a store, watches, queues, retries, and more. At the end, we'll look at what one of these loops looks like in a real operator. 7. "Writing a Kubernetes Operator in the Age of AI" by Fernando Villalba, Numtide. Six months into building a production Kubernetes operator for Multigres with AI, the code stopped being the hard part. Most of the effort went into design, hygiene, continuous improvement, and review. What I learned in 1,303 commits is that the best way to use AI is to build a factory floor of specialists you orchestrate yourself. #articles

Can luring random online attackers into your Kubernetes clusters be fun or even useful? At least, we have a tool to try it out with minimal effort. Koney is a Kubernetes operator that implements so-called “deception policies” to discover and deter malicious users. Currently, it supports honeytokens as the only deception method by: - creating fake “sensitive” files, such as /run/secrets/koney/service_token, in all selected Pods; - monitoring the attempts to access them by collecting alerts from the Cilium’s Tetragon operator or via a smaller eBPF-powered file access monitoring tool (kivebpf); - logging these events and, optionally, sending alerts to external systems (currently, it supports only Dynatrace). Future project plans include adding other deceptive techniques (HTTP endpoints and payloads) and integrating the operator with Kyverno policies. ▶️ GitHub repo Language: Go | License: AGPL 3.0 | 89 ⭐️ #tools #security

Argo CD’s ApplicationSet got its UI Yesterday, a long-awaited feature for the Argo community finally landed: Argo CD’s Application UI was extended with the ApplicationSets tab. Starting from v3.5, you get a view of ApplicationSet details, an updated resource tree visualisation, and even a preview of the expected changes. Argo CD 3.5 RC is expected in a week (Jun 16), and its GA release will happen in two months (Aug 4). #news #gitops #gui