Boston, MA – Fairwinds, the leading provider of Kubernetes governance software, today announced updates to its open-source software, Nova, to provide Kubernetes users who are not using Helm charts with additional functionality for detecting out-of-date versions in their clusters.
To run production-grade Kubernetes environments, organizations require cluster add-ons, which often have their own update schedule and release cadence. Because of this, keeping track of updated versions can be challenging, and becomes an issue for critical updates such as security patches. While many users install add-ons via Helm, as Kubernetes adoption has grown DevOps teams have found other ways to install and manage them. Fairwinds has responded by updating Nova, which was traditionally a tool for Helm releases, with added functionality that does not require Helm.
Users can now run Nova with a new flag called “containers”, which examines all container images in a Kubernetes cluster and notifies users if a new version is available. Additionally, the new Nova updates provide three different alternatives for updating images: the absolute latest version, the latest minor version and the most recent patch version.
“Especially in multi-cluster environments, it’s easy to overlook available updates to the many add-ons that are in use. While we love Helm charts for helping to solve this problem, we realize not everyone uses them. We have updated Nova to operationalize updates on a regular schedule for both Helm and non-Helm users,” said Andy Suderman, CTO at Fairwinds. “DevOps teams have a lot to do so we work to make Kubernetes easy and more efficient for them. We’ve seen the number of non-Helm environments grow and wanted to respond by updating Nova, a known entity, so that it works for a wider audience.”
Fairwinds is committed to creating open source software that empowers the community and its clients to build a Kubernetes architecture that works for their business. Learn more about Nova and all of Fairwinds’ open source projects here.
