Kubernetes 1.24 Release Arrives to Finally Deprecate Dockershim

The Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) for Kubernetes today announced it released a long-anticipated update that formally removes support for a Dockershim interface that enables Docker, Inc.’s DockerEngine runtime to run on Kubernetes clusters.

Kubernetes 1.24 also will no longer have beta application programming interfaces (APIs) turned on by default. Existing beta APIs and new versions of existing beta APIs, however, will continue to be enabled by default.

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Overall, there are 46 enhancements being made available in this release, with 14 of those involving capabilities that the TOC says are now stable. There are 15 enhancements that have been moved to beta and 13 capabilities are now available in alpha.

Among those capabilities are beta support for publishing Kubernetes APIs in the OpenAPI v3 format and a beta release of gRPC probes functionality that makes it easier to configure them without exposing an HTTP endpoint or using an extra executable.

There are also several storage enhancements, including support for storage capacity tracking, the ability to resize persistent volumes and an effort to migrate the internals of in-tree storage plugins to call out to CSI Plugins while maintaining the original API. Finally, there is a PriorityClasses option that can be used to enable or disable pod preemption.

Other notable capabilities in alpha include beta support for dynamic retrieval of credentials for a container image registry using an instance of plugins that are compatible with open source sigstore software for managing keys rather than storing credentials on the node’s filesystem; a beta of a contextual logging capability that enables the caller of a function to control all aspects of logging and an opt-in feature that enables IT teams to soft-reserve a range for static IP address assignments for services. With the manual enablement of this feature, the cluster will prefer automatic assignment from the pool of Service IP addresses, thereby reducing the risk of collision.

James Laverack, release lead for Kubernetes 1.24, says the latest updates advance the platform that is now starting to be more widely used within IT environments. At this point, most organizations running Kubernetes are running multiple versions of the platform. IT teams that also want to continue to run DockerEngine can take advantage of an open source instance of Dockershim maintained by Mirantis. It may take several months, possibly years, for the bulk of earlier versions of Kubernetes clusters to be upgraded to version 1.24 of Kubernetes or higher.

In the meantime, it’s been more than six years since distributions of Kubernetes first became available. Initially, Kubernetes adoption was driven by full-stack developers that managed both applications and infrastructure. However, full-stack developers are hard to find and retain. IT operations teams that once found Kubernetes intimidating are now mandating its use to make consumption of IT infrastructure resources more efficient. The challenge, now, is convincing the rest of the application development community that frameworks that abstract away the complexity associated with building and deploying applications on Kubernetes are now accessible and that they should be used to build cloud-native applications.