OX2 Instances GA

We are proud to announce that ephemeral instance storage flavors are now generally available as a part of our OX2 instance. Customers can take advantage of these new flavors for: 

• Flexibility - OX2 instances can be dynamically provisioned or terminated as needed
• Fast I/O  - OX2 instances  can provide fast I/O throughput.
• Caching - OX2 instances can be used to cache data that is frequently changing and does not need to be retained such as logs for a web app
• Temporary storage - OX2 instances are ideal for workloads that focus more on processing data rather than storing it such as temporary analytics jobs

IKS 1.30 GA

We are excited to announce the availability of Kubernetes version 1.30 for your clusters that are running in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. This marks our 25th release of Kubernetes.  IKS 1.30 highlights include:

• Secure by Default Cluster VPC Networking
• Kubernetes API server audit policy improvements
• Pod Scheduling enhancements
• Webhook improvements

More details can be found in the blog here and the change log here

IKS - Secure By Default

Secure by default cluster networking focuses on keeping customer cluster workload safe by providing a zero trust network model immediately when creating new IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service 1.30+. 

Ubuntu 24 

We are pleased to announce beta support for running IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) clusters, with worker nodes running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. This gives our customers the ability to test running their workloads with the latest version of Ubuntu.

“Cluster Encryption” and “Worker pool encryption” enabled by default

Previously cluster encryption and worker pool encryption were defaulted to being toggled off in the UI during the cluster creation flow and are now defaulted to being toggled on.  Users can now benefit by having an additional layer of security enabled by default.