Latest Cloud Native Highlights: VMware‑Pivotal Deal, BeyondCorp, Chaos Mesh & K8s Updates

Industry News

VMware announced the completion of a $2.7 billion acquisition of Pivotal, making Pivotal a subsidiary and delisting it from the NYSE.

Google released the BeyondCorp whitepaper, describing its zero‑trust security framework that shifts access control to individual devices and users, eliminating the need for traditional VPNs.

PingCAP open‑sourced the Chaos Mesh platform for cloud‑native chaos testing, supporting fault injection types such as pod‑kill, pod‑failure, network latency, packet loss, duplication, corruption, partition, filesystem I/O delay and errors.

Upstream Progress

Kubernetes 1.16.5 Go Upgrade

The Go default version in Kubernetes 1.16.5 will be upgraded to Go 1.13.4.

kube‑apiserver Cache‑Consistent Reads

The feature implements quorum‑read logic similar to etcd. The basic flow is:

Obtain the latest revision from etcd and record it as v0.

If the cached revision ≥ v0, return the cached result directly.

Otherwise, issue an etcd WatchProgressRequest.

Asynchronously wait until the cached revision reaches v0; if the wait times out, fall back to a direct etcd read.

Master Rolling Upgrade Issue

During a master rolling upgrade, many clients connecting to the new kube‑apiserver trigger massive list + watch operations, causing an avalanche effect.

Open‑Source Project Recommendations

Chaos Mesh – a cloud‑native chaos testing platform for Kubernetes.

kubelive – an interactive tool for real‑time inspection and manipulation of Kubernetes resources, currently supporting pod‑related objects.

kubectl‑tree – a plugin that visualises the ownerReferences hierarchy of Kubernetes objects.

Prometheus Alert – an open‑source alert forwarding system that integrates with Prometheus, Graylog, Grafana and multiple messaging services.

Weekly Reading Recommendations

“Will Kubernetes Kill DevOps?” – explores whether the rise of Kubernetes will render traditional DevOps practices obsolete.

“2020 DevOps Trends to Watch” – outlines how DevOps continues to evolve and shape software delivery.

“Taichi: A 99‑line Graphics Language from a Tsinghua Yao‑Class Graduate” – introduces the open‑source graphics programming language that lowers the barrier to computer graphics.

“Kubernetes Scheduler: Architecture, Flow, and Scoring Algorithms” – detailed overview of the scheduler framework and customization options.

“2020 Forecast: Kubernetes as the Killer App for Edge Computing” – predicts Kubernetes’ pivotal role in edge scenarios.

“Kata Containers Founder: Introduction to Secure Containers” – compares Kata and gVisor virtualization technologies and discusses isolation benefits.

“Knative Auto‑Scaling Deep Dive” – explains the KPA auto‑scaling mechanism in Knative.

Cloud Native Technology Open Course

The CNCF and Alibaba jointly offer a free cloud‑native technology series featuring talks from global experts such as CNCF TOC member Li Xiang and ambassador Zhang Lei, aimed at bringing world‑class cloud‑native knowledge to Chinese developers.