We’re now supporting Kubernetes through to version 1.35.
That means new versions of our Kubernetes Cloud Controller, which provides tighter integration with Brightbox, adding Brightbox-specific details to the nodes in Kubernetes, labelling them with the zone, image type and the cloud addressing details and integrates with our Load Balancer service as an ingress controller.
And we’ve updated our Kubernetes cluster terraform manifests too, which helps you setup and manage a full auto-scaling Kubernetes cluster directly on Brightbox Cloud.
Kubernetes 1.35 brings a few really useful features but here’s a couple that stand out to me:
In-place vertical scaling of pods is now stable, so you can increase cpu and ram on pods without having to restart them. Kubernetes makes it easy to avoid downtime during restarts, but it’s still nice to be able to avoid them sometimes!
PreferSameNode traffic distribution is now stable too, which can really help with performance by keeping traffic within the same node when possible. Up until now, in the extreme cases, we’ve been solving this problem by running some services as sidecars which solves the problem but means you’re often over-provisioning services. Also note that PreferClose has become PreferSameZone.
This actually came along with 1.34 and is still in beta in 1.35, but it’s useful when you have a pod with multiple containers that make up one service and don’t want to have to think about specifically allocating cpu or ram to them individually. One example for us is running high load php apps, where we have separate apache and php-fpm containers. It makes no sense to be requesting/limiting apache cpu usage separately to php.
Again, this actually came up in 1.34 but it’s worth a mention. Deleting namespaces should no longer result in stuck namespaces due to problems with finalizers!
To upgrade your Kubernetes clusters, simply pull down the latest Terraform
configs from our repository
and run terraform apply. Terraform will then upgrade each node in your cluster
one by one and shouldn’t cause any interruption in service. We generally
recommend upgrading to the latest point release for your current minor version
before upgrading the minor version. And if you’re behind on minor versions,
upgrade each minor version in turn - don’t skip minor versions!
If your Kubernetes cluster is managed by us, then you don’t have to do anything and we’ll arrange the upgrade for you.
This is the last version of Kubernetes that supports containerd 1.x so you’ll want to be thinking about upgrading all your nodes. Aiming for the upcoming Ubuntu LTS 26.04 release will get you that, or consider upgrading containerd manually.
We’ve also been playing with the trimmed down lightweight Kubernetes project, k3s. Our cloud controller works perfectly fine on k3s and we’re working on some kubernetes manifests to build k3s clusters - coming soon!
You can sign up for Brightbox in just a couple of minutes and get a £50 free credit to play with Kubernetes.
We’ve got a simple guide to deploying a Kubernetes cluster pre-configured with our cloud controller using Terraform.
If you’re looking for a UK-based fully-managed Kubernetes solution, drop us a line.
