An overview of changes that affect how Kubernetes interfaces with OpenStack and how you can get involved.

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A big congratulations to the Kubernetes team on the 1.10 release slated to land on Monday, March 26.

Here’s a preview of some changes for how Kubernetes interfaces with OpenStack. One of the Kubernetes Enhancement Proposals introduced last year was the creation of a Cloud Controller Manager to allow cloud provider SIGs to directly manage their provider code that interfaces with Kubernetes.

During the 1.10 development cycle, Davanum Srinivas (a.k.a. Dims) maintained a fork of the upstream OpenStack provider code that uses the Cloud Controller Manager interface as a feature-for-feature replacement of the upstream provider. His repository holds more than just the provider code, it also has several other interface drivers developed by the Kubernetes and OpenStack community, including:

  • Two storage drivers that allow you to take advantage of the over 70 drivers available to Cinder over a single interface.
    • A Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for Cinder
    • A Flex Interface driver for Cinder
  • A webhook-based Keystone authentication and authorization driver for Kubernetes

Coincident with the 1.10 release, the Cloud Provider Working Group is beginning the migration of cloud providers to their own Kubernetes-hosted repositories. Earlier this week, we moved Dims’s external repository into its permanent new Cloud Provider OpenStack home. With that milestone passed, we’re full steam ahead on continuing to support features like block storage and load balancers for Kubernetes running on OpenStack clouds.

In the 1.11 development cycle, the K8s-SIG-OpenStack plans to:

  • Collaborate with WG-Cloud-Provider and SIG-Testing to enable upstream e2e testing of the cloud provider
  • Deprecate the upstream provider in favor of the external provider
  • Continue to support the Flex and CSI drivers
  • Expand Keystone integration with Kubernetes role-based access control
  • Collaborate with the other cloud provider SIGs participating in WG-Cloud-Provider to give users a consistent, tested and well-documented way to interact with any cloud of their choosing

I’m thrilled about the strong support we have for running Kubernetes on OpenStack and even more excited about the developments coming in the weeks and months ahead.

We’re actively looking for people to help out with these efforts and welcome contributions to the provider code, documentation, bugs, feature requests, and installation experiences. SIG-OpenStack has a Slack channel, which is an excellent starting point to get involved.

At the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, we’ll have over 60 sessions dedicated to Kubernetes integrations. In addition to the talks, it’s also a great place for some in-person time with contributors and community leaders. I’ll be attending and am looking forward to catching up with old and new friends.

A huge thanks to everyone who has contributed to these efforts, but especially:

  • Dims for his heroic efforts in both communities
  • David Lyle and Robert Morse for helping lead K8s-SIG-OpenStack
  • Fengyun Pan and Yuquan Ren for their numerous feature additions, bug fixes, and provider maintenance
  • Angus Lees for the creation and maintenance of the OpenStack provider
  • Saverio Proto for his numerous blog posts highlighting Kubernetes and OpenStack Integrations
  • Joe Topjian for maintaining the critical Gopher Cloud SDK that underlies the OpenStack provider
  • All of the users and contributors who are running a fully integrated open-source application platform with Kubernetes on OpenStack

Also, thanks goes out to the WG-Cloud-Provider team for helping to build out a common framework for all of the providers, making it possible to ensure a consistent and positive experience no matter what cloud host you use.

Finally, we’re excited to announce the release of the latest Cloud Native Computing Foundation dashboard, now featuring OpenStack as one of the target public clouds. This CI system runs nightly test jobs against CNCF projects. It uses a cross-cloud deployment tool to build a multi-node, highly available Kubernetes cluster to run end-to-end tests against, as well as install and test other projects on like Helm and Prometheus. You can even try the installer out for yourself! A special thanks goes out to Mohammed Naser and Vexxhost for their generous infrastructure contribution for this testing effort.

Congratulations to all on the forthcoming 1.10 release and now on to 1.11!

Chris Hoge is the OpenStack Foundation’s senior strategic program manager.