The new release of Talos, our modern operating system for secure Kubernetes hosts, is out! Version 0.6 includes updated releases of Kubernetes (version 1.19) and Linux (5.8), a new text-based dashboard for node statistics and activity, and support for local QEMU Kubernetes clusters. As always, this release includes more operating system APIs, lots of stability and performance improvements, and bug fixes.
Kubernetes 1.19 and Linux 5.8
In keeping with our approach to stay current with the major upstream components used by Talos, we have updated Kubernetes to 1.19 and the Linux kernel to version 5.8.5. Our goal is to make sure that the components that make up your Talos-based clusters are secure, stable, and well-tested. Letting your environment fall behind the frequent releases of Kubernetes and Linux can expose your clusters to dangerous security vulnerabilities, so we work hard to integrate these important components soon after they are available.
TUI Dashboard
While one of our goals at Talos is to eliminate the need to manage individual nodes in your cluster, and instead treat the entire cluster as a single distributed system, sometimes during setup or troubleshooting you need to see what’s going on with a single node. To help, we’ve implemented a nifty text-based “graphical” view of each node, showing CPU usage, network activity, a process list, and more. It’s a little bit of a blast from the past, and we hope it’s useful!
QEMU Local Clusters
Talos has the capability to launch virtualized test clusters on your laptop or workstation for development, testing, and experimentation. Prior to version 0.6, we supported Docker- and Firecracker-based clusters. In version 0.6, we added support for fully-virtualized QEMU kubernetes clusters, which allows realistic emulation of bare metal hardware and can be used to deploy Arges and Sidero, our bare-metal management platform for Kubernetes.
New APIs
With every release of Talos we continue to expand and refine the management API that is at the heart of our operating system. Most of the new APIs in this release are in support of the dashboard feature above, and include the following:
- Retrieve node hostname
- Retrieve node load averages
- Retrieve node system stats (context switches, process statistics, interrupt requests, CPU statistics, etc.)
- Retrieve node CPU information
- Retrieve node network device statistics
- Retrieve node disk statistics
Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
As always, this release contains a variety of bug fixes and stability and performance improvements. To find out more, you can see the full changelog HERE.