Release Spotlight: Crossplane v1.20.0
Last week, Crossplane (a CNCF Incubating project) announced its quarterly release, v1.20.0, with numerous new features and enhancements. The real-time compositions, which actively watch for changes to respond to them immediately, matured to Beta and became enabled by default. The ImageConfig API now supports mirroring Crossplane packages to private repositories. Some community providers, including Kubernetes and Helm, got the change logs feature, enabling these providers to log every change and the reason for it.
Function response caching is a new Alpha feature that allows to cache the responses in the function pipeline to reduce the amount of requests Crossplane sends. Another highlight in this release is including shell autocompletion for the
crossplane CLI.Other noticeable updates in the Cloud Native space:
1. vCluster, a namespace-based solution for virtual Kubernetes clusters, released its v0.25.0, featuring support for external standalone etcd, a simplified initContainer process, added validation for cert-manager, KubeVirt and External Secrets, and deprecated k0s and k3s support.
2. Kmesh, a high-performance service mesh data plane (a CNCF Sandbox project), announced its v1.1.0, bringing access logs and metrics for long-lived TCP connections, refactored DNS module, BPF config map optimisation, optimised kernel-native mode, and compatibility with Istio 1.25.
3. Kargo, an application lifecycle orchestration platform for Kubernetes, was updated to v1.5.0, with better Project configuration via a new namespaced CRD, enhanced conditional promotion step execution, ConfigMap access and improved Secret access in expressions, improved Workload Identity Federation support in GKE, and Bitbucket support in
git-open-pr and git-wait-for-pr promotion steps.4. Backstage, a framework for building developer portals (a CNCF Incubating project), has seen v1.39.0, accumulating 260 pull requests from 74 contributors. It got a REST API for Scheduler Service, its design system Canon updated to 0.4.0 (with a new Tab component), federated credentials for Azure DevOps integration, Valkey support for cache service, and custom AuthConnector implementations. It also removed support for several features from the old backend system and deprecated React 17.
5. CloudNativePG, a platform to run and manage PostgreSQL databases in Kubernetes (a CNCF Sandbox project), released its 1.26.0, introducing declarative offline in-place major upgrades of PostgreSQL, enhanced startup and readiness probes for replicas, declarative management of extensions and schemas, a new annotation to enable webhook validation, and integration with autoscalers like Karpenter for better node drain management.
6. Flux (a CNCF Graduated project) landed v2.6.0 just yesterday. It came with the general availability of Flux OCIRepository API to store the Kubernetes desired state in container registries, image automation digest pinning, object-level workload identities, GitHub App authentication for Git repositories, and several improvements in notifications and controllers.
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