Excited to present our newest digest of the prominent software updates in the Cloud Native ecosystem!

Release Spotlight: Flux v2.7.0

At the end of September, Flux (a CNCF Graduated project) released its v2.7.0, marking the general availability of Flux Image Automation APIs and controllers, i.e. image-reflector-controller and image-automation-controller working together to update Kubernetes manifests in Git when new container images appear in container registries.

Other new features include watching for changes in ConfigMaps and Secrets, integration of Kubernetes Workload Identity at the object level for all Flux APIs, OpenTelemetry tracing for Flux reconciliations, and the artifact generators implemented in a new source-watcher controller.

Other noticeable updates in the Cloud Native space:

1. K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution (a CNCF Sandbox project), was updated to 1.34, which is now based on Kubernetes v1.34 and brings several significant changes. Namely, they are an increased automatic certificate renewal window, optional airgap image tarball imports, enhanced certificate check output, certificate management for kube-scheduler and kube-controller-manager, retention flag for S3-stored snapshots, and an official governance model for the project.

2. Freelens, a fork of Open Lens (the core of Lens IDE for Kubernetes), was updated to v1.6.0. This version added force deletion and finalisation for Pods and other resources, new additional columns for Pods and Deployments lists, more details in the cluster role bindings views, and better support for Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics.

3. Podman Desktop, a developer-focused GUI for simplified container management (a CNCF Sandbox project), released 1.22. It introduced a new Explore Features section on the dashboard, an ability to switch Podman machines between rootless and rootful for macOS and Windows, a new option to apply YAML without creating a file locally, transparent proxy support, and an ARM64 Podman installer for Windows.

4. Headlamp, a Kubernetes web UI developed by the Kubernetes SIG, has seen its 0.36.0, featuring persistent table sorting, enhanced global search, support for EndpointSlice resources, support for running Headlamp embedded within Backstage, better capabilities for plugins, numerous Helm chart improvements, and more.

5. Keycloak, an identity and access management solution (a CNCF Incubating project), was updated to 26.4.0. This release introduced passkeys for passwordless user authentication, SPIFFE or Kubernetes service account tokens usage for Federated Client Authentication, simplified deployments across multiple availability zones, and support for the final specifications of FAPI 2.0 (Security Profile and Message Signing) and DPoP (Demonstrating Proof-of-Possession in OAuth 2.0).

6. Cozystack, a PaaS platform and framework for building clouds (a CNCF Sandbox project), released v0.37.0, bringing a brand-new GUI based on openapi-ui and aware of all allowed settings. Its other changes include Vertical Pod Autoscaler for etcd and dependency updates (Cilium, Velero, Flux Operator).

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