Product release

Announcing Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) 0.9.0 Alpha 2

Today we are happy to announce the release of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) 0.9.0. This is the second pre-release version of ECK, which is built for managing Elasticsearch and Kibana on Kubernetes. We encourage you to try ECK out and give us feedback through our Discuss forum or through our GitHub repository.

IMPORTANT: This is an alpha release and is intended for testing purposes only. Do not deploy in production.

The release notes give an overview of all that has changed from the first release.

Here are the highlights of this release:

Elastic Cloud on (more) Kubernetes

Our goal for ECK is to be the best experience for running the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. We understand many of our users might be making use of vanilla Kubernetes, one provided by their cloud provider, or an enterprise-focused version. The initial alpha version supported Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and vanilla Kubernetes version 1.11 and up. With ECK 0.9.0 we’ve extended this to the following distributions:

  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • Red Hat OpenShift 3.11+
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
  • Amazon Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)
  • Vanilla Kubernetes

Elastic APM Server enters ECK

Elastic APM gives you rich insights into your application performance and visibility for distributed workloads. This data paired with infrastructure metrics and logs allows you to troubleshoot faster and observe the whole picture as you move your apps to production. Elastic APM supports languages such as Java, Go, Ruby, Python, .NET, and Javascript and even has integrations to standards such as OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry that are popular in the Cloud Native landscape.

With ECK 0.9.0 you can now add all this functionality with Elastic APM Server as a new manageable custom resource alongside Elasticsearch and Kibana. To learn more about spinning up Elastic APM Server with ECK, visit our quickstart guide.

Custom plugins, bundles, Docker repositories, and config

One of the new features in ECK 0.9.0 is enhancements to the Elasticsearch and Kibana custom resources. These enhancements include support for adding custom plugins, bundles, and custom configuration for both Kibana and Elastic APM Server. Users who are running Kubernetes in an air-gapped environment or want to use a custom Docker repository can use the new pod template options to specify a Docker repository including credentials.

More security your way

ECK comes with free security on by default for every deployment created. We also understand customers may make use of custom HTTP certificates when accessing Elasticsearch and Kibana. We’ve now extended the custom resources to accept custom HTTP certificates when creating new deployments. In addition, users can leverage ECK 0.9.0 customization options to add authentication such as SAML and OpenID.

Conclusion

Be sure to check the release notes for even more details on changes in version 0.9.0. Download ECK 0.9.0 to get started, and we look forward to your feedback.