Kubernetes 1.8 Update for SUSE CaaS Platform

We just rolled out Kubernetes 1.8.7 as online update to SUSE CaaS Platform 2. You can now update your cluster to this new version from the dashboard.

Your existing workloads will continue to run, no changes are needed to continue running them. Workloads will survive this update like any cluster update.

Kubernetes 1.8 brings many stabilization fixes and new alpha features. The role based access control (RBAC) has been moved to stable. Also, the release moves the Workloads API (Deployment, DaemonSet, ReplicaSet, and StatefulSet) to the apps/v1beta2 group, for details see “Workloads API changes in versions 1.8 and 1.9“. For new workloads, use the apps/v1beta2 – but existing workloads will still work.

If you are running the Kubernetes dashboard, update it to version 1.8 manually.

Some notes for SUSE CaaS Platform

Your authentication tokens will be invalid after this update, every user will need to download a new token from the admin dashboard.

While Kubernetes always recommended systems without swap for guaranteed performance, Kubernetes 1.8 now enforces a system without swap. Kubernetes tightly packs instances for full memory utilization and  if swap would be enabled, it would be used and slow down running container instances. Therefore, our Salt scripts will disable swap on all Kubernetes nodes now as part of this update. [Note that this is currently broken]

Additionally, we rolled in a couple of bug fixes for SUSE CaaS Platform including the Velum dashboard.

I invite you to go to your Velum dashboard, look for the update message, and update your cluster to Kubernetes 1.8!

Solved: Temporary Problem With this Change – for NEW Installs

We encountered – and fixed in the mean time – a problem with this update where for one specific case swap was not disabled:

This only affects new installations from the Install Medium when online update during installation – as is recommended – is enabled. In this case, Kubernetes will not start when it sees swap used. Run “swapoff -a && systemctl restart kublet” to restart the kubelet process. The next update will then fix it.

Customers having installed prior to this update, have already swap disabled via this change. Therefore, the update to Kubernetes 1.8 will work fine and nothing needs to be done.

We have released an additional update now that will fix the new installations with updates enabled. If you run a new installation and use SMT for mirroring the repository, ensure that the repositories contain the update. If you download directly from our SCC, you are fine.

Updates to this post:

• 2018-02-23 17:10 UTC: Added a warning to not update the cluster yet since we found a problem with it.
• 2018-02-23 18:30 UTC: Added “Update problem” section
• 2018-02-23 19:20 UTC: Renamed and updated “Update problem” section.
• 2018-02-23 21:30 UTC: Extra update has been released, everything fine again.