Canonical Kubernetes 1.26 is now generally available

Canonical Kubernetes 1.26 is now generally available for both distributions, Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s, following the release of upstream Kubernetes on the 8th of December.

We consistently follow the upstream release cadence to provide our users and customers with the latest improvements and fixes, together with security maintenance and enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu.  This blog is a quick overview of the latest development highlights available in Canonical Kubernetes 1.26 as well as a look at our favourite upstream enhancements.

What’s new in Canonical Kubernetes 1.26

All upstream Kubernetes 1.26 features are available in Canonical Kubernetes for both its distributions, MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes. The following highlights are new in Canonical Kubernetes 1.26. For the full list of features, you can refer to the Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s release notes.

MicroK8s 1.26 highlights

MicroK8s for Cluster API

Canonical Kubernetes is glad to announce  MicroK8s bootstrap and control plane providers for Cluster API. MicroK8s based clusters deployed with Cluster API benefit from powerful MicroK8s features such as automatic and frictionless patch-level upgrades, a comprehensive set of addons to ease the cluster deployment and operations, as well as the ability to deploy any Kubernetes version with ease. 

The latest Cluster API MicroK8s providers come with RBAC improvements and support for  AMD64 and ARM64 architectures.

New EKS-D tracks

MicroK8s introduced new tracks for EKS-D which is a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). These new tracks bundle the extra patches from the EKS Distro as well as various addons for storage and authentication that offer a similar experience to EKS with all the added benefits of MicroK8s.  Instructions on how to install EKS-D with MicroK8s.

The addon ecosystem expands with new partnerships

The evolution of the addon ecosystem continues to strengthen MicroK8s. The following addons are new in the 1.26 release: 

• Gopaddle: Provision multi-cloud clusters, dockerise applications, deploy, monitor and build DevOps pipelines within a fraction of time.
• Ondat: Run stateful workloads at scale.
• KWasm: Tooling for cloud-native WebAssembly.
• Sosivio: Next Generation Kubernetes Security made easy.

New Core addons 

Core addons are Kubernetes services shipped with MicroK8s and supported by Canonical Kubernetes. MicroK8s 1.26, continues extending the core addon ecosystem with the introduction of MinIO: high-performance, S3 compatible object storage.

Charmed Kubernetes 1.26 highlights

Charmed Open Policy Agent Gatekeeper brings managed policies

As of 1.26, there is a new charm developed by Canonical to enable OPA gatekeeper on our Charmed Kubernetes distribution. This exciting new application allows a popular community policy controller to be easily installed, managed and upgraded within the lifecycle management of Juju. For more information and to try it yourself, visit the Charmhub page here.

Kube-OVN BGP support

The Kube-OVN charm’s new bgp-speakers config option makes it possible to peer Kubernetes nodes with external BGP routers and exchange routing information for Kube-OVN subnets. This makes it possible to access pod IPs directly from external networks.

Kube-OVN traffic mirroring

The new enable-global-mirror and mirror-iface config options make it possible to configure traffic mirroring for Kube-OVN. When configured, Kube-OVN will mirror pod network traffic to a network interface on each Kubernetes node, making it easier to observe network traffic with tools such as tcpdump.

MetalLB enhancements

The metallb-controller and metallb-speaker charms have been upgraded to v0.12 and can now be deployed to a wider variety of architectures, with support for AMD64, ARM, ARM64, POWER(ppc64le), and s390x machines.

New default OS series

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is now the default series for new deployments of Charmed Kubernetes. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS remains fully supported.

Changelog for upstream Kubernetes 1.26

You can read the changelog for full defaults regarding features, deprecations and bug fixes included in 1.26.

Learn more about Canonical Kubernetes or talk to our team

• ubuntu.com/kubernetes
• microk8s.io
• #canonical-kubernetes and #microk8s on the Kubernetes Slack
• Discourse
• Twitter – @canonical, @ubuntu