Be like water, my friend.
It was bound to happen eventually
Most of you who consume Kubernetes have likely already heard the news that Kubernetes is going to deprecate Docker support in an upcoming release. Surprisingly I have seen quite a bit of panic from both consumers who host their own clusters and from those who use hosted solutions like AKS and GKE. Specifically because some how its getting around the deprecation is happening on version 1.2.
The only thing that consumers should notice in 1.2 is a kubelet warning that gets logged if Docker is the current runtime, the actual deprecation is not expected to occur until 1.23 or later which won’t release until late 2021.
You have plenty of time!
I’m not going to regurgitate the many already regurgitated stories on this. Instead, I will share with you the bits of information I believe will help you save time and premature aging by providing you with the best information up front.
This can help clear up some misconceptions if you’re not totally clear on Docker vs Container Run Times. Long story short, K8s has to use a shim with the docker runtime because a lack of Docker compliance with CRI.
2. K8s Dockershim Deprecation FAQ
A solid list of information on what will work, what wont, what you should be looking to do, and so on. This should help put your mind at ease.
Great info on what's going on, and brings us full circle discussing what devs and admins should be considering while explaining why in a very clear abstracted way.
Ladies and gentlemen….USE THIS. Don’t wait until the last second to ask questions that might negatively impact you if you don’t get what you need.
Final Thoughts
You have plenty of time to work this out. Be sure to understand clearly what you need to do to be successful. Ask questions. if you’re using a hosted solution like AKS or GKE you won’t need to worry as much since they will take care of everything for you by upgrading the masters and helping the upgrade process to be as simple as hitting upgrade or running a simple command.
I know for a fact that in AKS you can already start playing with clusters that are using containerd as the runtime, though it is in preview. Check it out here.
