Microsoft welcomes 'raddest' and most 'feature-dense' Kubernetes release to AKS, shows 1.17 the door

Mere months to go before 1.21 arrives

Kubernetes 1.20 has finally put in an appearance on Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), just squeaking into March and a good few months since the upstream release.

The release also means the end of life for 1.17, which went to GA in AKS in July 2020 after its upstream release in December 2019.

The support for each version by the Kubernetes community was recently upped from nine to 12 months. As far as Microsoft is concerned, AKS supports the latest GA minor version along with two previous latest minor versions.

"You should upgrade... as soon as you're able, to ensure your cluster is fully patched and supported," the company said.

Fine for those happy to feed their pipelines with the latest and greatest. Perhaps less good for enterprises keen to buy into the world of containers but who are used to the lengthy Microsoft support periods of old.

It is quite the hefty release too. The Kubernetes 1.20 Release Team called it "The Raddest Release" and "one of the most feature dense" in a while.

Feature-dense it might be, but the gang still took the opportunity to deprecate Dockershim and warned that "support for Docker is deprecated and will be removed in a future release."

New stuff now at last available for AKS users includes a stable version of volume snapshot operations and Process ID limiting.

Also handy is the alpha of graceful node shutdown, which makes the kubelet aware of node system shutdowns and so enables the graceful termination of pods rather than, as the team delicately put it, "cause issues for some workloads."

The AKS update comes days after the Kubernetes team made RC0 of v1.21 of the technology available. Microsoft expects to apply the 1.21 update in June (assuming an April upstream release happens) which will also be the cue for 1.18 in AKS to hit end of life. ®