The Canonical Kubernetes team is delighted to announce that Canonical Kubernetes 1.25 is now generally available, with Charmed Kubernetes joining our Microk8s release last week, following the release of upstream Kubernetes on 23 August.

We consistently follow the upstream release cadence to provide our users and customers with the latest improvements and fixes, together with security maintenance and enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu.  This blog is a quick overview of the latest development highlights available in Canonical Kubernetes 1.25 as well as a look at our favourite upstream enhancements.

What’s new in Canonical Kubernetes 1.25

All upstream Kubernetes 1.25 features are available in Canonical Kubernetes for both its distributions, MicroK8s and Charmed Kubernetes. Additionally, the following features are new in Canonical Kubernetes 1.25. For the full list of features, you can refer to the Charmed Kubernetes and MicroK8s release notes.

MicroK8s 1.25 highlights

Strict confinement goes into general availability

MicroK8s is delivered through Snaps and enjoys the benefits of updates and security features.
With this release, we are taking security one step further by implementing strict confinement as a new availability channel. We’re delighted to offer our users a confined Kubernetes experience with restricted host system access and a more restrictive security posture.

More information on strict confinement in Microk8s can be found in our blog post.

Shrinking snap size

We’re constantly striving to improve our user experience, and as part of this, we want to give you MicroK8s in the fastest way possible. As part of this, we’ve reduced our snap size by up to 25% to help you get your Kubernetes up and running faster than ever. 

Addons go from strength to strength

With the introduction of core and community addon repositories, new observability, networking and security addons are generally available in this release. For a list of the available addons, see the MicroK8s documentation.

Image side-loading support

In order to facilitate offline deployments, faster start-up times and local development, we have introduced image sideloading support into MicroK8s 1.25.

Power9 architecture support 

You asked for it; we listened.

For our community that uses Power9 based machines for acceleration, security and data-intensive workloads; MicroK8s can now be operated on these systems.

Charmed Kubernetes 1.25 highlights

Telco-ready CNI

Identifying a need for increasingly sophisticated SDN within Kubernetes, Charmed Kubernetes now has a Kube-OVN charm. This enables a set of new networking capabilities such as BGP, VXLAN, QoS, IP Dualstack and more. 

High availability secret management

Furthering our commitment to resilience, we have now extended the Hashicorp Vault charm to provide HA capabilities, ensuring your secrets are always available.

Cloud provider integration

OpenStack, vSphere and Azure become the latest Cloud integrations to benefit from updated Charmed Kubernetes charms. With these integrations, we enable you to deploy our Kubernetes and make it your own as you leverage native features within those clouds.

Lightweight observability

Canonical Observability Stack (COS Lite) now integrates with our flagship networking charm Kube-OVN. This marks a commitment to providing high quality relations that enable zero-ops observability.

CDK-addons uplifted to operators

As an effort to keep our charms evergreen and ready for production use, we have uplifted CDK-addons to individual operators. This provides a range of benefits, from individual build processes to versioning and releasing. 

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS support

All the components of Charmed Kubernetes can now run on the newest Ubuntu release for the very latest kernel features and security enhancements.

Changelog for upstream Kubernetes 1.25

You can read the changelog for full defaults regarding features, deprecations and bug fixes included in 1.25.

Learn more about Canonical Kubernetes or talk to our team

• ubuntu.com/kubernetes
• microk8s.io
• #canonical-kubernetes and #microk8s on the Kubernetes Slack
• Discourse
• Twitter – @canonical, @ubuntu