How to test the latest Kubernetes 1.22 release candidate with MicroK8s
Alex Chalkias
on 21 July 2021
Tags: kubernetes , MicroK8s , release candidate , testing
This article is more than 1 year old.
Today, the Kubernetes community made the 1.22 release candidate available, a few weeks ahead of general availability, planned for August the 4th. We invite developers, platform engineers and cloud tech enthusiasts to experiment with the new features, report back findings and bugs. MicroK8s is the easiest way to get up and running with the latest version of K8s for testing and experimentation.
MicroK8s is a lightweight, pure-upstream Kubernetes distribution with enterprise features such as self-healing high availability, Prometheus, Grafana and Istio baked-in as add-ons. As MicroK8s tracks all upstream releases, you can use the snap channels to select between, e.g. the latest/stable release for production or a beta or release candidate release for testing.
Test the latest Kubernetes on your machine
It requires a single command to get the latest Kubernetes with MicroK8s:
sudo snap install microk8s --channel=1.22/candidate --classic
Alternatively, go to https://snapcraft.io/microk8s and select 1.22/candidate.
MicroK8s runs on Ubuntu and all major Linux distributions, Windows and macOS. It supports x86 and ARM, and it is resource optimised to run on devices such as the RaspberryPi or the NVIDIA Jetson.
If you have feedback, good or bad, please let us know on Discourse or Slack (#microk8s). And if you have any bugs or technical issues to report, you can file them over on GitHub.
For more on MicroK8s, you can read the docs, follow the tutorials or dive into the use cases.
What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes, or K8s for short, is an open source platform pioneered by Google, which started as a simple container orchestration tool but has grown into a platform for deploying, monitoring and managing apps and services across clouds.