What’s New in Cloud Native: Helm 3 Beta, Cilium 1.6, Kubernetes Enhancements & Top Open‑Source Projects

Industry News

Helm 3 first beta (v3.0.0‑beta.1) released – focuses on final refactoring and back‑porting Helm 2 features. Related link: https://github.com/helm/helm/releases

Cilium 1.6 released – now able to replace kube‑proxy 100% and includes performance test results. Related link: https://cilium.io/blog/2019/08/20/cilium-16/

Pivotal’s open‑source controller kpack – provides a resource controller for building and updating container images. Related link: https://github.com/pivotal/kpack

Upstream Important Progress

Kubernetes apiserver request prioritization (KEP) – introduces finer‑grained classification of observed requests and assigns each request to a concurrency pool based on priority. The existing max-in-flight limits mutating and readonly requests, but this KEP adds priority‑aware limits for other request types. References: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/pull/1218, https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/sig-api-machinery/20190228-priority-and-fairness.md

HA master StorageVersion API – detects inconsistent storage versions across apiserver instances during rolling upgrades and blocks migrator progress when versions differ. Reference: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/pull/1220

Scheduling framework redesign – a plugin‑based architecture for the Kubernetes scheduler, allowing new scheduling features to be added as plugins. Expected to reach beta in Kubernetes 1.17. References: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/configuration/scheduling-framework/, https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/issues/624

Other updates

Fix for kubectl -f on Windows (explicit follow symlink). https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81747

CustomResourceDefaulting promoted to Beta and enabled by default; v1beta1 webhooks/CRD types deprecated. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81872, https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81899

Allow apiserver to start with HTTP/1 only (DisableHTTP2). https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81860/files

Scale client now supports non‑namespace (cluster‑wide) resources. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81507

Kubelet now accounts for pod‑overhead when calculating pod resource usage. https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/79247

etcd Project Updates

MVCC: default compact batch size set to 1000 and interval to 10 ms. Adjusted per‑cluster based on QPS testing.

Raft: allow learner nodes to vote in special cases, fixing a scenario where a promoted learner could not obtain votes after a voter failure. https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/pull/11034, https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/pull/10998

Knative Project Updates

Serving and Eventing have entered a performance‑optimization phase with benchmarks (deployment benchmark, activator throttler toggling, eventing latency testing). References: https://mako.dev/benchmark?benchmark_key=5143375149793280, https://mako.dev/run?run_key=5276035817930752, https://mako.dev/run?run_key=6012349710336000

Eventing moves Channel and Subscription resources to the messaging.knative.dev API group, redefining them as routing constructs rather than simple event forwarders. https://github.com/knative/eventing/pull/1742

Open‑Source Project Recommendations

microk8s – a lightweight, single‑package Kubernetes distribution ideal for offline development, IoT, and edge devices. Includes serverless (knative), service mesh (Istio), monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), and ML (Kubeflow). https://github.com/ubuntu/microk8s

qlkube – provides a GraphQL API for Kubernetes by generating a GraphQL schema from the OpenAPI/Swagger spec. https://github.com/qlkube/qlkube

kube‑fzf – combines kubectl with the fuzzy finder fzf to simplify common operations such as searching pods, tailing containers, describing resources, exec’ing into pods, and port‑forwarding. https://github.com/thecasualcoder/kube-fzf

Reading Recommendations

"The State of State in Cloud Native Applications" – explores state handling in cloud‑native apps and future directions. https://thenewstack.io/the-state-of-state-in-cloud-native-applications/

"How Kubernetes Could Orchestrate Machine Learning Pipelines" – discusses using Kubeflow pipelines for ML training and MLOps on Kubernetes. https://thenewstack.io/how-kubernetes-could-orchestrate-machine-learning-pipelines/

"Kubernetes Web UIs in 2019" – surveys Kubernetes UI projects and outlines expectations for future web interfaces. https://srcco.de/posts/kubernetes-web-uis-in-2019.html

"Deep Dive into Helm 3" (Chinese) – detailed analysis of Helm 3’s alpha releases and upcoming features. https://yq.aliyun.com/articles/703943

"Knative Eventing Choice Introduction" (Chinese) – introduces the Choice feature for event filtering in Knative Eventing. https://yq.aliyun.com/articles/716661

"Service Mesh Development Trend (Part 2)" (Chinese) – examines Istio’s Mixer v2, Envoy WebAssembly support, Google Traffic Director, and SMI developments. https://skyao.io/talk/201908-servicemesh-development-trend2/