CoreOS Blog

CoreOS Fest is coming up next week! We look forward to welcoming you to the Kubernetes and distributed systems community event on Wednesday, May 31 and Thursday, June 1. We’ll see how the container ecosystem has developed and what new work is being done in the world of distributed systems. We’re anticipating insightful conversations on how to build, run, and secure your infrastructure with open source projects like Container Linux, etcd, Kubernetes, and more!

Prometheus is a monitoring system and time series database expressly designed for the highly distributed, automated, and scalable modern cluster architectures orchestrated by systems like Kubernetes. Prometheus has an operational model and a query language tailored for distributed, dynamic environments.

CoreOS Fest, the distributed systems, containers and Kubernetes conference, is coming up on May 31 and June 1 in San Francisco. This two-day event is the only 2017 West Coast conference for those in the Kubernetes community (new and seasoned alike) to come together and share stories, and we want to make sure you are all planning to be there. Last year, the event was in Berlin, and for its third year CoreOS is bringing the conference back to San Francisco.

Distributed systems commonly rely on a distributed consensus to coordinate work. Usually the systems providing distributed consensus guarantee information is delivered in order and never suffer split-brain conflicts.

It is a great honor for me to welcome Mitchell Baker, executive chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, to the CoreOS board of directors. She’s one of the most influential people in open source software, advocating for a safer and better internet through open source projects and internet standards.

Kubectl is a familiar tool if you use Kubernetes, and it has a broad functionality that takes time to master; it can be a more powerful tool than many people expect. Great resources exist for working with the kubectl command line interface. This is a collection of tips and tricks that will allow you to expand your ability to work with kubectl. Be sure to take a look at the cheat sheet in the kubernetes.io docs section as well!

At the end of March we saw Kubernetes 1.6, the first release led by a non-Google employee (CoreOS’ own Dan Gillespie), released in upstream. Today we announce the release of CoreOS Tectonic 1.6.2.

The primary focus of this release, in addition to delivering the most current, upstream version of Kubernetes to Tectonic users, is to turn on a number of features that deliver enterprise Kubernetes.

The major updates that make up Tectonic 1.6.2 include:

While Kubernetes is ushering in a world where SSH is less necessary on a daily basis for deploying and managing applications, there are still instances when SSH is necessary for gathering statistics, debugging issues, and repairing configuration issues. So, while years from now there may not be a need to SSH and run one-off debugging sessions, the tools below are useful for quickly SSH'ing into machines in your Kubernetes cluster.

Bringing AWS Application Load Balancer support to Kubernetes with Ticketmaster

Teams running Kubernetes have long desired more than the "out of the box" cloud provider integration for load balancers. This is especially true on AWS, where provisioning a Classic Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) per service might not cut it (financially and functionally).

Locksmith is the component included in CoreOS Container Linux that manages machine reboots after an update has been downloaded. This is a critical part of the operating system that we’ve had in place since the launch of our distribution, and today is part of the reason why when a security vulnerability is released we can update every auto-updating Container Linux machine on the order of hours.

Locksmith has four update strategies: