Ask an OpenShift Admin Office Hour - OpenShift 4.8 for Administrators

Kubernetes 1.21! Vertical Pod Autoscaler! CronJobs! IPv6! GitOps! OpenShift 4.8 will be generally available very soon, so in this episode we’re taking a spin around and looking at the new features and updates important to administrators. 

Here are the features of 4.8 we covered today:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS has been rebased to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. This provides important updates to the kernel, as well as drivers and other core operating system functions.
• OpenShift sandboxed containers offer Kata Containers functionality in OpenShift. Sandboxed containers offer isolation, via the hypervisor, beyond what “standard” containers are capable of. You can get a deeper dive of the technology and functionality behind sandboxed containers from this live stream.
• This release introduces several API graduations, including the Vertical Pod Autoscaler (VPA). The VPA will increase or decrease the resources allocated to a Pod automatically based on metrics and policy. We showed a demo of the functionality in action here.
• OpenShift 4.8 introduces the ability to see which APIs are going to be removed in future versions via the oc get apirequests command. This will make it easier for admins and devs to see which of their Kubernetes objects will need to be updated before updating their clusters.
• NIC sharing and guaranteed bandwidth was talked about during the what’s new presentation, so I wanted to dig into the details. Details are a bit sparse right now, which we talked about during the stream, but this feature relies on the OVN-Kubernetes SDN’s use of Open Virtual Switches (OVS). OVS has the ability to implement QoS queues, which are, for this initial release, managed using machine config.
• OpenShift 4.8 introduces the first of Red Hat’s CSI drivers for many of the cloud provider and other infrastructure platforms. These are mostly tech preview in 4.8, but you should definitely be aware of what’s happening with storage provisioning and consumption, along with how it will impact your applications - which, it shouldn’t! The goal is to have the transition from in-tree to CSI drivers seamlessly!

As always, please see the list below for additional links to specific topics, questions, and supporting materials for the episode!

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Episode 34 recorded stream:

Use this link to jump directly to where we start talking about today’s topic. 

This week’s top of mind topics:

• OpenShift on ARM was recently announced as developer preview this week! You can listen to Chris and I talk about it during the stream here, or visit the link to get information on how to get started testing today!
• Did you know that the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, a.k.a. cloud.redhat.com, has been redesigned? The new interface has many convenience features like quick links to downloads and the active releases - including support cycles - along with improved reporting on your clusters, entitlement usage, and more.
• When the stream aired, 4.5.41 did not have an update edge available to an OpenShift 4.6 version. That has been fixed and you can now update to 4.6, which will be important to do before 4.8 becomes available to say within support guidelines.
• The Red Hat knowledgebase has a consolidated OpenShift troubleshooting article, which provides a single place to find links for other articles about troubleshooting, testing, gathering information, and fixing issues with many aspects of OpenShift. Be sure to bookmark this page!

Questions answered during the stream:

• Can I configure Thanos with OpenShift 4.8? Yes, Thanos is automatically configured when Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) is used or when you add user workload monitoring to your OpenShift cluster. You can also deploy Thanos standalone if you’d like, it’ll work great with OpenShift 4.8. If you’re interested in more information, we talked about Thanos during episode 31 , where we talked about monitoring and AlertManager.