Kubernetes issued a new release called “Haru” on Wednesday, and the release notes and logo might be more interesting than the software.
Here’s the logo.
Kubernetes 1.36 Logo – Click to enlarge
According to the launch announcement from the Kubernetes 1.36 Release Team, the new version “arrives as the season turns and the light shifts on the mountain.”
An artist named Natsuho Ide , who goes by avocadoneko, created the logo and drew inspiration from Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景, Fugaku Sanjūrokkei) – a famous sequence of drawings that includes the iconic image The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
The post says version referencing Hokusai with the logo for version 1.36 of Kubernetes therefore felt fitting, especially as the images proved so popular the great artist added another ten to the collection.
The logo “reimagines one of the series’ most celebrated prints, Fine Wind, Clear Morning (凱風快晴, Gaifū Kaisei), also known as Red Fuji (赤富士, Aka Fuji): the mountain lit red in a summer dawn, bare of snow after the long thaw.
The post says the name of the release – ハル (Haru) – “is a sound in Japanese that carries many meanings; among those we hold closest are 春 (spring), 晴れ (hare, clear skies), and 遥か (haruka, far-off, distant). A season, a sky, and a horizon.”
“At the foot of Fuji sit Stella (left) and Nacho (right), two cats with the Kubernetes helm on their collars, standing in for the role of komainu, the paired lion-dog guardians that watch over Japanese shrines. Paired, because nothing is guarded alone,” the post adds.
“Stella and Nacho stand in for a very much larger set of paws: the SIGs and working groups, the maintainers and reviewers, the people behind docs, blogs, and translations, the release team, first-time contributors taking their first steps, and lifelong contributors returning season after season. Kubernetes v1.36 is, as always, held up by many hands.”
“Brushed across Red Fuji in the logo is the calligraphy 晴れに翔け (hare ni kake), ‘soar into clear skies’. It is the first half of a couplet that was too long to fit on the mountain.”
晴れに翔け、未来よ明け
hare ni kake, asu yo ake
“Soar into clear skies; toward tomorrow’s sunrise.”
The post then gets a little wistful.
“That is the wish we carry for this release: to soar into clear skies, for the release itself, for the project, and for everyone who ships it together. The dawn breaking over Red Fuji is not an ending but a passage: this release carries us to the next, and that one to the one after, on toward horizons far beyond what any single view can hold.”
Every other author of release notes now has a very high bar to clear to do better.
And the software?
Parts of the K8s Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) ecosystem have reached full production maturity, delivering what the project calls “a permanent, secure framework for cluster administrators to access and manage hardware resources globally.” That should make K8s more manageable.
There’s also VolumeGroupSnapshot support, which will improve resilience and recoverability, and new ways to scale the number of storage volumes a node can utilize.
This is also the release that retires Ingress NGINX, the tool so flawed that maintainers decided to retire it rather than attempt a repair job. ®
