Google brings release channels and Windows Container support to its Kubernetes Engine
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, the bi-annual gathering of cloud-native computing boffins, Google today announced that it now offers three release channels for its Google Kuberentes Engine (GKE): Rapid, Ragular and Stable. With these, Google Cloud users can decide whether they want the freshest release or the most stable one — or easily evaluate the latest updates in a development environment. This new feature is now in alpha testing.
“Each channel offers different version maturity and freshness, allowing developers to subscribe their cluster to a stream of updates that match risk tolerance and business requirements,” Google explains in today’s release.
The company is launching this new feature into alpha with the first release in the Rapid channel, which will give developers early access to the latest versions of Kubernetes .
With this release into the Rapid channel, Google is also bringing early support for Windows Containers to GKE. Over the course of the last few releases, the Kubernetes community brought improved Windows support to the platform and now Google will offer support for Windows Server Containers in June.
In addition to these features, the company is also releasing Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring into general availability. This tool can be used to monitor and log data from GKE, as well as Kubernetes deployments in other clouds and on-premises infrastructure.