How to check for changes in k8s upgrades
Confidentiality:
Purpose
When upgrading Giant Swarm releases you will notice that the Kubernetes version is also being upgraded. As part of the upgrade process, it should be a habit to check for the newest changes upstream. This ensures that the diffs, deprecations, and new features from an upstream Kubernetes perspective are known to the customer.
There is not a right or wrong way to go about this process because there is no single tool that simply gives all of the answers. However, the following tools combine to give a nice overview of the important changes. Let us know if you have thoughts or recommended tools as well!
Tools
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Pluto This one is a tool that will show you deprecated APIs in your code, helm charts, and resources.
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Sysdig Blog Sysdig is writing a good summary on the major changes in K8s that can be used as reference.
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k8s.io Release Notes All kubernetes release notes.
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Giant Swarm Releases Our own release page and we try to give you a better overview on the important changes. Tip: Once we deprecate a release, it is moved to “archived”, so you might need to dig in there to find our past versions where the K8s version is changing.
Giant Swarm
When upgrading to a new Giant Swarm version, another idea to see the changes would be to use the tool yamldiff. Using Giant Swarm versions as examples: Let’s say the current version is 17.4.4
and the target version is 18.3.0
. To use yamldiff you would input the YAML files from both current release on the left and target release on the right to learn about the changed components.