CKA book, Hashicorp License change and Kubernetes 1.28

Aug 16, 2023

Hey folks, how are you doing? There has been a lot happening lately and this newsletter edition will be more of a long blog with my book announcement, my view on the Hashicorp license change and the new shiny Kubernetes 1.28 release.

CKA book

Finally, after months of efforts I was able to publish my new book as an independent author → CKA Scenarios for Kubernetes CKA certification. This Book consists of various scenarios/practice questions related to Kubernetes CKA Certification. It is a 85+ page book with 26 scenarios in total covered with complete solutions including the setup for each scenario and some essential concepts.
This book will help you in your CKA journey in a guided manner to perform various tasks on your Kubernetes clusters.

The book costs $13 but with this special link you will get it for $10.
I have dedicated this book to my brother Aseem Pathak.

Hashicorp License Change

Hashicorp new license to BSL change has caused a lot of thinking wrt open source. Recently Hashicorp moved all of its open source products to a new BSL License which has blown up the internet. From the License and the posts I have read, it is not going to impact the end users who are consuming the product, it will not impact if you are using it in production inside your own internal developer platform. It will impact the projects that are using their products and building on top of them and selling them. In short if you are providing SAAS solutions on the Hashicorp products, you need to rethink the strategy as you won't be able to go to the next version and keep doing that by providing kind of competitor service. Now who Hashicorp considers their direct competitor can be something to watch out for in future. There are cloud providers who have wrappers around terraform that provides form within their cloud provider and I think they are impacted too.

Also, In open course if the OSS projects are not under a foundation then no one apart from the maintainers controls the license. So If you are just using nay OSS to build your SAAS, you are trusting the single vendor backed OSS product and the maintainers, now they can anytime change the license and you should not get pissed off. This is where I think Foundations like CNCF and others will play a major role in getting the projects accepted and then having a regulation on the license. Also, it gives more confidence to the users who can trust a foundation and keep using it and also vendors who want to build a living out of it.

OSS is hard to make money from as if the apache 2 License or free for production and commercial use licensed product takes off, there will be forks and there will be commercial offerings (might be better than yours) on top of that. Since the business is hard , there can be license changes as when a project like terraform scale, it takes lot of engineers to maintain and that too from hashicorp benefitting all the SAAS built on top of that. So, a company in their best interest of business can take decision that can help them grow their business. There is not much you can do about it, whether is right or wrong because with a business, VC money in place and competitors not contributing back to the OSS backed by single vendor these decisions can be taken. So Hashicorp need to make money and they have already done a lot out there with innovation. Plus as end users you can still use it as you are using even in production, it’s the SAAS if you are using or providing that is based on Hashicorp's products will be a challenge now.

My take - If you are using any OSS project form foundations like CNCF, its fine as they will protect the License game. But if you are using a vendor specific open source project, it might go into a license change based on various business factors and can impact your business. So you need to choose your decisions wisely and trust the maintainers plus the vendor behind it and be ready for such future changes. It has happened before, it will happen again.

The latest in this is the opentf.org where approx 30 orgs with majority os SAAS over terrafrom or products using terraform have pledged to create and maintain a fork of pre BSL terraform version. I think this is where we are heading to but it is not ideal.

Kubernetes 1.28

Hot off the press Kubernetes 1.28 has been released with fancy new feature and the initContainer with a restartPolicy Always making them the first class citizen and giving a new meaning to sidecar containers is the top favourite one. This is currently in alpha with total → 12 graduating to stable 19 to Alpha 14 to Beta.

I love the logo <3

Now as soon as it came out within 18 minutes of the release I created a Killercoda playground for Kuberentes 1.28 where you can experiment with Kubernetes 1.28 for free. Go check out now and experiment with Kubrnetes 1.28.

Major themes included in this release

Changes to supported skew between control plane and node versions - this makes the control plane upgrades a little faster.
GA - recovery from non-graceful node shutdown - stateful workloads to failover to a different node successfully after the original node is shut down or in a non-recoverable state, such as the hardware failure or broken OS.
Improvements to CustomResourceDefinition validation rules
ValidatingAdmissionPolicies graduate to beta - I did a video on this, will dive soon into the latest enhancements for this.
Hot favourite alpha: API awareness of sidecar containers - introducing restartPolicy for init containers.
Dynamic Resource Allocation good for external resources like GPU's

Any many more features… Look out for my new video this week on Kubernetes 1.28, maybe multi-part video.

A few blogs to read for Kubernetes 1.28

Kubernetes v1.28: Planternetes - official release announcement blog
Kubernetes 1.28 - What's new? by Víctor Jiménez Cerrada
A guide to Kubernetes sidecars: what they are, why they exist, and what Kubernetes 1.28 changes by William Morgan
Kubernetes 1.28: the security perspective by Ben Hirschberg

What am I doing?

Apart form the book, I am already working on another book and video course, stay tuned for more info. For the Kubernetes bootcamp in Hindi, there are 2500 signups done and 7500 to go. You can fill the form here.

I will be at Civo Navigate happening in London in the first week of September and looking forward to meeting the cloud native folks. Many great speakers like Kelsey, Viktor, Rawkode and my friends. IF you are in or around London area on 5th and 6th of September then do let me know and DM me for the discount code for 50%(I have 18 left)

I along with Divya and Nancy are planning first ever Sustainability miniconf in Bengaluru on 14th of October, we are looking for. local sponsors(not heavy money, DM either of us to know more and support)

20th and 21st October 2023 is when DevOpsDays Bengaluru is happening, make sure to register for the conference and it is always a sold out conference and also DM if you would like to sponsor the event.

KubeDay India - Yayyy!! Finally its happening, Kubeday India is happening on 8th of December in Bengaluru. CFP and sponsorships are open.

Learning resources/repos

aptakube - Modern and lightweight Kubernetes desktop app to help you manage multiple clusters
Rust Algorithms - All Algorithms implemented in Rust
OSCE³ and OSEE Study Guide