Hello Cloud Gurus. I'm Nigel Poulton, the author of The Kubernetes Book and the KCNA book, all about how to smash the KCNA exam. Anyway, this is Kubernetes This Month, the show that brings you all the top news and happenings in the world of Kubernetes. In this episode we'll look at Managed Prometheus, the rise of Knative, the upcoming KubeCon Europe, the latest release of the NSAs Kubernetes hardening guide, Go 1.18, and something with possibly the coolest name in the entire ecosystem.

Now, while you’re here, be sure to subscribe so you always know what’s going on with Kubernetes and cloud native. In today's world, where just about everything seems to be being offered as a managed service, I suppose. It's no great surprise that Google Cloud announced the general availability of their Managed Service for Prometheus. So every cloud's offering managed Kubernetes, yeah? Well, as Prometheus is the defacto platform for monitoring Kubernetes, I suppose it's a bit of a no-brainer that folks are eventually gonna start offering Prometheus as a service. So Prometheus itself is an open-sourced, cloud-native monitoring service that scrapes telemetry from remote systems and then aggregates it for the usual analysis and maybe performance tuning and troubleshooting.

At small scale, honestly, Prometheus is pretty simple but once you start to scale it up, this is when it gets hard. And I mean, not only Prometheus that gets hard, but things like just storing the absolute masses of log and metric data, even that becomes its own problem or issue. And this is exactly where Google Cloud's Managed Service Prometheus comes into play. It is aimed squarely at Prometheus at scale, and as part of the service, it offers full two year retention of metrics. And seriously, two years of all metrics when operating at scale, and remember we're talking here about microservices apps, where every microservice is churning out its own high quality telemetry.

Believe me, that can be a whole lot of data. So for Google to come along and say, "Don't worry about the telemetry data. We'll keep that for you." Believe me, that is a pretty big weight off your mind. Announcing it as GA.

Yeah, that's a big deal, but I've no doubt that this is only the start for managed Prometheus. I mean, if you look at where Google Kubernetes Engine is today, compared to when it first went GA, if managed Prometheus is gonna take a similar road, there is exciting stuff ahead. Huge congratulations to Knative for being accepted as an incubating CNCF project. Knative is a leading open source technology for running event-driven serverless applications on Kubernetes. It was originally founded by Google in 2018.

And it's been sitting for a little while as a sandbox project in the CNCF. So this promotion, if you will, to incubating is a sign of its ongoing adoption and maturity. I dunno if you know, but for any project to progress from sandboxing to incubating, it's got to prove to the CNCF technical oversight committee that it's got all of the following: a healthy number of committers, a steady stream of commits and merges, a clearly defined versioning scheme, a process for accepting and fixing security issues, and last but not least, proof that it's being used in production by at least three real-world customers. So no walk in the park. Well for Knative, like I say, it's been around since 2018.

Version 1.0 was released late last year. It's currently on, I think version 1.2, with roughly a regular six week release cycle. It's got nearly 2,000 contributors, around a thousand PRs a month, thousands of Slack channel members, and most importantly, real-world production users including Alibaba Cloud, Bloomberg, IBM, VMware and more. This is obviously great news for the project, but it's also great news for Kubernetes. Like not only is Kubernetes great at orchestrating container workloads, projects like Knative and OpenFaas are extending it to be a great place for serverless workloads.

All of which is keeping Kubernetes ahead of the rest and making it the number one place for cloud-native apps. Are you keen to start your cloud journey? Well, we've just launched a new limited time offer for our Personal Plus annual plan, saving you 33%. This gets you access to great course features such as hands-on labs and practice exams, all making it easier to kickstart your cloud career. If you're interested, scan the QR code on the screen or click the link in the description. Okay.

So time for my other the topics from last month. I'm excited to see the schedule announced for KubeCon Europe in Valencia, Spain, and the best bit for me is that it is in-person again. So I've already got my ticket sorted, and it'd be really cool to see you there. But you know what, as well as the main KubeCon event, there's a growing number of interesting co-located events. So this time around there's eBPF Day, Telco Day, Wasm Day, Kubernetes AI Day, GitOpsCon, CloudNative Data Management Day, and even more.

If you are going, make sure you come and say hi. If you can't make it, don't worry. They're also streaming a bunch of it as a virtual event. The NSA and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Intelligence Agency has released version 1.1 of its Kubernetes, hardening guide.

It's 50-odd pages long, and it covers things like non-root containers, immutable file systems, namespaces, network policies, secrets, rbac, logging, and more. Is it a fun read? Okay, maybe it is for some, I'll let you be your own judge. But what it definitely is, is a solid place to start for tips on securing your Kubernetes environment. I've put the link to it in the show notes. This one's not strictly Kubernetes, although Kubernetes is written in Go, and so is a bunch of the instrumentation type stuff.

But Go 1.18 just shipped. And according to the announcement, it's pretty much the biggest ever release of Go. At least since it all began. So if you do your stuff in Go, go check out version 1.18. Well, the coolest product name of the month definitely goes to Thundernetes.

It's an open source project for running Linux game servers on Kubernetes. Now I'm not even remotely a gamer, so I barely even know what that means, but it's open source and it's from the folks at Azure Xbox. And if you are into gaming and Kubernetes, who knows, maybe it's of interest to you. For me, I just love the name. Thundernetes.

And you know what, that's it for this month. If you like this episode, check out our newly added free course this month, Hands-On Kubernetes Troubleshooting, which you can access without paying a thing with our free ACG membership. And on that note, stay safe and I'll see you again next month. Same kube time, same kube place.