In September last year we announced the addition of Karpenter as experimental feature. Since then we have been making improvements to our implementation and gradually used some pilots internally and with some customers. We are happy to announce that Karpenter is now deployed by default (via AWS Fargate) on all our EKS clusters and we’ve migrated the system NodePool to use it instead of the standard Cluster Autoscaler.
All Vault setups have been updated to the latest version 1.15.4. Please refer to the upstream changelogs to see what’s changed:
Update 2023-09-28: All clusters have been upgraded to v1.28.
After internal reflection and based on customer feedback, we’re disabling customer Slack notifications for infra level alerts by default. These are alerts which Skyscrapers is responsible for follow-up, and caused confusion with customers whether they needed to take action or not.
As part of our regular upgrade cycle, the following Kubernetes cluster components have been updated and our gradually rolling out to all our managed clusters.
More …We uncovered a bug in our VPA deployments were the VPA was no longer updating its recommendations. As effect the VPA was no longer updating the deployments it was managing.
More …We’ve upgraded all Teleport clusters from version 13.3.8 to 14.0.1. Teleport is a tool we mostly use internally to provide secure and auditted access to (EC2) instances, Kubernetes clusters and several dashboards. The nodes will gradually be upgraded to the new version when new instances are launched.
Update 2023-10-10: Upgrades have been applied on all clusters.
More …Historically we’ve been using Calico as controller to provide NetworkPolicies support. This was offered as an optional feature only, considering the resource (and thus possible cost) impact of running this component. As announced in our K8s 1.27 upgrade post, the latest version of the AWS VPC CNI, responsible for providing cluster networking, now has native support for NetworkPolicies built-in.
We’re adding support for GPU node pools in EKS. GPU nodes are great for compute-intensive workloads such as graphics and visualization workloads, or machine-learning processes. AWS uses the NVIDIA device plugin to make the GPU capacity of a node available to Kubernetes workloads.
More …Update 2023-09-28: All clusters have been upgraded to v1.27.
Karpenter is a new big feature that we offer in our AWS reference solution
More …We’ve upgraded all Teleport clusters from version 13.3.0 to 13.3.8. Teleport is a tool we mostly use internally to provide secure and auditted access to (EC2) instances, Kubernetes clusters and several dashboards. The nodes will gradually be upgraded to the new version when new instances are launched.
We’ve upgraded all Teleport clusters from version 13.0.3 to13.3.0. Teleport is a tool we mostly use internally to provide secure and auditted access to (EC2) instances, Kubernetes clusters and several dashboards. The nodes will gradually be upgraded to the new version when new instances are launched.
In an effort to further reduce the footprint of the reference solution we are no longer going to deploy the kubernetes-dashboard* by default. The Skyscrapers team is using k9s as a tool to manage our clusters and we think its a worhty replacement. This tool can just run in your terminal and doesn’t require any deployments on the K8s side. If you have this workload enabled today we will reach out to you to check if you are using this and take action based on your input.
More …Update 2023-07-18: These updates have been rolled out to all environments.
More …Update 2023-07-18: These updates have been rolled out to all environments.
More …In order to improve our services we changed the way the Kubernetes nodepools are structured. Previously there was a default nodepool that had a mix of both Kubernetes add-ons and application deployments. This made things more complex than it needed to be. Therefore we created a dedicated system nodepool where all add-ons are scheduled on. During this change we also took a closer look at the requested resources for all add-ons and made adjustments where needed. For most of our customer environment we’ve been able to reduce the cluster size with at least 1 equivalent node. A handful are break-even for now, but we have further optimizations planned as follow-ups.
We are rolling out AKS and EKS v1.26. This brings our supported AKS platforms to v1.26.3 and EKS to v1.26(.5). Please make sure to update to our recommended client versions matching this upgrade
All Vault setups have been updated to the latest version 1.13.3. Please refer to the upstream changelogs to see what’s changed: