Skyscrapers Changelog

This changelog lists all updates, improvements and new features our Engineering team develops for our Reference Solutions. These are rolled out automatically to all SRE-as-a-Service customers.

Upgrade EKS to 1.16

05 Jun 2020 • Kubernetes
 kubernetes  eks  upgrade  dashboard

We have updated our EKS control planes and nodes to the latest supported version: 1.16. This brings EKS on K8s v1.16.8.

In the process of upgrading EKS the following components have also been upgraded:

  • KubeProxy from 1.15.11 to 1.16.8
  • Cluster Autoscaler from 1.15.5 to 1.16.5
  • AWS VPC CNI from 1.5.7 to 1.6.1
  • Kubernetes Dashboard from 1.10.1 to 2.0.1

Upon writing staging and production clusters of most customers have been upgraded. The upgrade of clusters where we detected usage of incompatible apiVersions is currently on hold until you have updated these resources (see Actions to Take).

Important changes between K8s 1.15 and 1.16

  • Significant changes to the Kubernetes API.

    Many APIs have graduated to stable and support for deprecated APIs has been removed. For more details, check Actions to Take and the Kubernetes blog.

  • GA of Custom resources and Admission webhooks

    CRDs are in widespread use as a way to extend Kubernetes to persist and serve new resource types, and have been available in beta since the 1.7 release. The 1.16 release marks the graduation of CRDs to general availability (GA).

    Admission webhooks are in widespread use as a Kubernetes extensibility mechanism and have been available in beta since the 1.9 release. The 1.16 release marks the graduation of admission webhooks to general availability (GA).

For more detailed info on what’s new and changed, please check the Kubernetes 1.16 release announcement and full Kubernetes 1.16.x changelog.

Other changes

As part of the 1.16 upgrade, we have also included the following changes:

  • Kubernetes Dashboard updated from 1.10.1 to 2.0.1

    The 2.0 release of the dashboard comes with a whole set of fixes and improvements. The frontend has been completely rewritten in Angular 8 and this release also includes metrics like Pod and Node CPU and memory usage.

    Important: We now deploy the K8s dashboard in it’s own namespace, so you’ll have to update your proxy command, for example:

    alias kube-dashboard='kubectl auth-proxy -n kubernetes-dashboard https://kubernetes-dashboard.svc'

    For more details, please check our documentation.

  • Dynamic calculation of kube-reserved on K8s nodes

    On each K8s node a portion of computing resources is reserved for critical system processes. Previously we hard-coded the amount of these reservations, however thanks to an upstream change in the EKS AMI these values are now dynamically set depending on EC2 Instance size in function of max number of Pods per node.

    This change should ensure a more realistic reservation and further improve overall stability.

  • Replaced old kube-spot-termination-notice-handler with the aws-node-termination-handler

    The aws-node-termination-handler is an AWS-maintained project which next to draining Spot nodes when they receive a Termination notice, can also react to other EC2 maintenance events.

Actions to take

Many APIs have graduated to stable and support for deprecated API versions has been removed. In short you need to make sure that most Workloads (like Deployments, StatefulSets etc) use apps/v1 and no longer extensions/v1beta1 as apiVersion in your Kubernetes manifests and/or Helm chart. Also make sure to check your apiVersion when using NetworkPolicies and PodSecurityPolicies.

As an extra, you can also move Ingresses from extensions/v1beta1 to networking.k8s.io/v1beta1 in preparation of it’s deprecation in Kubernetes 1.22.

Full details on which apiVersions are deprecated can be found here: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2019/07/18/api-deprecations-in-1-16/.

If we have detected that you currently use such deprecated versions, you’ll find an issue in your GitHub repository and your Lead will follow up with you further.

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