Changelog
This changelog lists all updates, improvements and new features our Engineering team develops for our Skyscrapers Reference Developer Platform. These are rolled out automatically to all DevOps-as-a-Service customers.
2020 Q2
- 2020-05-06
Maintenance
Loki - Option to set custom labels in Promtail
We now offer the option to parse custom log labels with Promtail so you can use them in Loki. Previously there was only the default log labels where you could filter on in Loki. As of now it is possible to adjust promtail to parse extra labels from your …
- 2020-04-27
Maintenance
Update of cluster components
We have updated the following cluster components to their latest version: Dex v2.22.0 -> v2.23.0 external-dns 0.6.0 -> 0.7.1 Grafana 6.7.1 -> 6.7.3 kube2iam 0.10.8 -> 0.10.9 metrics-server 0.3.5 -> 0.3.6 oauth2-proxy 5.0.0 -> 5.1.0 …
- 2020-04-16
Maintenance
Upgrade EKS to 1.15
We have updated our EKS control planes and nodes to the latest supported version: 1.15. This brings EKS on K8s v1.15.11. In the process of upgrading EKS we updated: KubeProxy from 1.14.9 to 1.15.11 Cluster Autoscaler from 1.14.11 to 1.15.5 Although …
- 2020-04-16
Maintenance
Improved Slack notifications for Prometheus alerts
We’re updating the format of our monitoring Slack messages. As you already know, all the alerts produced by your Kubernetes clusters show up in Slack. The goal is to provide visibility on what’s going on in your infrstructure and application, …
- 2020-04-16
Maintenance
Adjusting the NodeFilesystemSpaceFillingUp Prometheus alert
You might have noticed the NodeFilesystemSpaceFillingUp alert passing by on some occasions. That alert triggers when Prometheus predicts that a node’s disk will run out of space, based on the trend of the last few hours. Usually, that alert triggers …
- 2020-04-14
Maintenance
Simplifying our ECS monitoring
We’re deprecating the Prometheus setup of our ECS clusters. We released that setup a while ago as an alternative for both infrastructure and application montoring for our ECS clusters, similar to what we have in place for Kubernetes. But we’ve …
- 2020-04-10
Maintenance
Migration to Helm 3
We have migrated all our managed cluster add-ons and our CI to Helm 3. Compared to Helm 2, version 3 comes with quite a lot of improvements, of which most aparent is the removal of the Tiller server component: Removal of Tiller Release Names are now scoped …
- 2020-04-09
Maintenance
Auto configuration for AWS ElasticSearch multi-az deployment
Our AWS ElasticSearch terraform module now supports auto-configuration for multi-az deployment. The criteria is to always enable multiple Availability Zones up to 3 zones and within the available resources, unless specified otherwise by the user. Your lead …
- 2020-04-01
Maintenance
Help fight COVID-19 with your Kubernetes cluster
In the context of the current global situation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we’re making it easy for us and our customers to commit part of our infrastructure spare resources to the Folding@Home project. In short, Folding@Home uses distributed …
2020 Q1
- 2020-03-31
Maintenance
Upgrades to monitoring components
We’ve rolled out some minor updates to the monitoring components. List of updated components: grafana: v6.6.2 –> v6.7.1 Several enhancements and bug fixes. prometheus: v2.14.0 –> v2.15.2 Several enhancements and bug fixes, including …
- 2020-03-27
Maintenance
Cluster addons upgrades
Over the past weeks we’ve rolled out a bunch of updates to our Kubernetes addons stack for all staging and production clusters. List of updated components: cert-manager: v0.9.0 –> v0.13.1 During the process we also made it through the major …
- 2020-03-27
Maintenance
Alert and documentation for NodeWithImpairedVolumes
Using EBS-backed Persistent Volumes on Kubernetes comes with some caveats. Among those is the (silent) limit of maximum attachments per EC2 instance. For more information about this issue, you can check the documentation. We have also added an alert to …
- 2020-03-26
Maintenance
Use NetworkPolicies
We have deployed Calico to our EKS setups as a network policy engine. By default, Pods are non-isolated and thus accept traffic from any source. By specifying NetworkPolicies you can isolate Pods from each other and thus have more fine-grained K8s …
- 2020-03-26
Maintenance
Upgrade of core EKS components
We have upgraded the core cluster components, running in kube-system, to their latest recommended versions (for EKS 1.14): AWS VPC CNI from 1.5.3 to 1.5.5 CoreDNS from 1.3.1 to 1.6.6 KubeProxy from 1.14.7 to 1.14.9 These are minor updates, bringing some …
- 2020-03-25
Maintenance
Upgrade Concourse to version 5.8.1
We rolled out Concourse version 5.8.1 to all our setups. This is a CVE version upgrade that patches an edge case of CVE-2018-15798 You can check out the full Concourse changelog here.
- 2020-03-23
Maintenance
Upgrade Caddy to version 1.0.4 with ACMEv2
We rolled out version 1.0.4 of the Caddy web server to all our setups which use on-demand “whitelabel” type of domains. All these certificates are now being requested and renewed against the ACMEv2 API. ACMEv1 has been deprecated for a while …
- 2020-03-17
Maintenance
Upgrade Concourse to version 5.8.0
We rolled out Concourse version 5.8.0 to all our setups. This is a minor version upgrade, coming from version 5.7.2, and it includes the following: The firrst step to spaces in Concourse a handful of fixes and smaller features. You can check out the full …
- 2020-02-25
Maintenance
Vault on K8s
As of now we have the option to deploy Vault on our reference solution out of the box. Previously we setup Vault on a 2 node EC2 cluster with a Dynamodb backend. This way of working had some downsides and made it harder for us to maintain and upgrade the …
- 2020-02-21
Maintenance
All secret data is now encrypted in our Kubernetes definition files
As you may know, we define our Kubernetes clusters’ desired state in a yaml file, which is stored in the customer private Git repository. That file is then fed into our CI, which is the one responsible for rolling out the cluster. That cluster …
- 2020-02-11
Maintenance
Bugfix - Velero backups failing on some clusters
We use Velero as our solution to backup complete K8s cluster workloads (both K8s resources and Persistent Volumes). However, we discovered and resolved 2 bugs in our implementation which could lead to failed K8s resource backups: An error in our policies …
- 2020-02-11
Maintenance
Bugfix - Raise fs.inotify limits
During our migrations from KOPS to EKS clusters, some customer Pods had issues launching, due to hitting fs.inotify.max_user_instances and/or fs.inotify.max_user_watches limits. Turns out these sysctl have been raised from their defaults for the KOPS base …
- 2020-01-16
Maintenance
Documentation on how to have feature environments on Concourse
The Concourse team is working hard to have an implementation to accomodate feature environments in Concourse. However this is still WIP at this moment and per request of our customers we researched a way to have feature environments with Concourse. …
- 2020-01-16
Maintenance
Allow runing K8s nodes and Concourse workers in public subnets
We now make it possible to run (part of) your Kubernetes and/or Concourse worker nodes in public subnets, if the situation requires it. However our default is still to deploy these instances in private subnets. These nodes will get a public IP assigned, …
- 2020-01-15
Maintenance
Bugfix - loki-promtail wasn't scheduled on tainted nodes
We offer Grafana Loki as default logging solution, which relies on the Promtail daemonset for gathering logs on each K8s node and shipping them to Loki. However the Promtail pods weren’t scheduled on Kubernetes nodes with a Taint in place. This is …
- 2020-01-15
Maintenance
Bugfix - Grafana instability, increased memory request/limit
For some customers, with more complex dashboards, Grafana has recently become unstable sometimes due to hitting our configured memory limits. Instead of using a fixed value, this is now configurable on a per cluster basis.