We are pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Cloud Native Environment Release 1.9, the scalable and highly available Kubernetes distribution that can be used to deploy your containerized applications across public clouds and on-premises.

Oracle Cloud Native Environment is an integrated suite of software components for the development and management of cloud native applications. Based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Open Container Initiative standards, Oracle Cloud Native Environment delivers a simplified framework for the installation, update, upgrade, and configuration of key features for orchestrating microservices through Kubernetes.

This release includes Kubernetes 1.29 and introduces support for the latest Oracle Linux 8 and Oracle Linux 9 releases on x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.

New features and enhancements

Oracle Cloud Native Environment 1.9 highlights include:

  • CNCF Kubernetes Conformance certification* has been completed for Kubernetes 1.29.3. For a list of the Kubernetes API Server changes since the last update in Oracle Cloud Native Environment, see the upstream Kubernetes Release Notes.
  • CRI-O is updated to Release 1.29.1.
  • Calico is updated to Release 3.27.0.
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Controller Manager is updated to Release 1.28.0.
  • Istio is updated to Release 3.27.0.
  • Kata Containers is updated to Release 3.2.0.
  • KubeVirt: KubeVirt is updated to Release 1.1.1.
  • NGINX Ingress Controller Module support
    • The NGINX Ingress Controller plays key roles for Kubernetes. The controller accepts the traffic coming from outside the Kubernetes cluster and load balances it so it can reach the various containers within your platform; the NGINX Ingress Controller also manages the egress traffic present within a cluster for services that may need to communicate with an external service. The controller is also capable of automatically revising the load-balancing rules whenever you add or remove containers from a particular service. Further details are available at NGINX Ingress Controller Module documentation

* The Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program test suite is a subset of e2e tests that SIG Architecture has approved to define the core set of interoperable features that all conformant Kubernetes clusters must support. The tests verify that the expected behavior works as a user might encounter it in the wild.

New tutorials available for Oracle Cloud Native Environment

You can expand your Oracle Cloud Native Environment knowledge free of charge! You’ll find many new tutorials and labs in our Help Center. They are divided into six sections:

  • Installation and upgrade
  • Kubernetes
  • Networking
  • Storage
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
  • Other

Technology Previews

Technology preview features represent code anticipated for inclusion in Oracle Cloud Native Environment in a future release.

Oracle Cloud Native Environment 1.9 release includes the following technology previews:

  • Immutable image dedicated to Oracle Cloud Native Environment deployment: a container-dedicated operating system, built from Oracle Linux and optimized for Kubernetes to allow for the easy deployment, update, and maintenance of Kubernetes cluster nodes
  • New Graphical User Interface: based on the open source project Headlamp; provides full administration of multicluster Kubernetes deployment
  • The Oracle Application Catalog: available through the browser-based user interface; facilitates the installation of supported modules for Kubernetes
  • Introduction of new components for Kubernetes:
    • FluentBit for log management
    • Kube-Prometheus-Stack (Prometheus and its operator/exporter, Grafana, kube-state-metrics)
    • Cert-manager

Note: technology preview components and features should not be used in a production environment.

Installation and upgrade

Oracle Cloud Native Environment is installed using packages from the Unbreakable Linux Network or the Oracle Linux yum server and container images from the Oracle Container Registry. Existing deployments can be upgraded in place using the “olcnectl module update” command.

You can install Oracle Cloud Native Environment by following the instructions in the getting started guide. You can also update Oracle Cloud Native Environment by following the updates and upgrades guide.

Support for Oracle Cloud Native Environment

Support for Oracle Cloud Native Environment is included with an Oracle Linux Premier Support subscription.

Oracle Linux Premier Support is included with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure subscriptions and Oracle Premier Support for Systems at no additional cost.

Additional resources