It's about time to sail our ship to Istanbul and see all of the new features and tweaks that come with the 1.2 release. This time around we focused on streamlining the installation flow, providing a simpler way of testing lambda functions, giving more power and flexibility to Kyma Eventing, migrating to a new version of Istio, and providing even more useful documentation.

Just as we initially promised, the developers are working hard to deliver new features and improvements every four weeks. Our last release is already available for 3 weeks, which means that the next Kyma version will be available in about a week. This time around, the release gets its codename from a city with an incredibly rich history, one that bridges the gap (literally!) between the East and the West. Kyma 1.2 Istanbul has a very rich history of improvements and new features and continues to aid the users in bridging the gap between different pieces of software. What's in store for the 1.2 release?

Recently, on our website, we released a new view called Roadmap. Its main purpose is to raise the transparency of the project direction and enable features contribution.

After the long-awaited 1.0 Gliwice release, we focused mainly on putting the polishing touches to the current setup, including improvements in the Console UI performance and usability, Asset Store and Service Catalog extensions, Application Operator optimization, and documentation-related tweaks. Still, we are proud to communicate a few new features we bring to you in 1.1 Helsinki. Read on to find out what has changed in Kyma since 1.0.

The 1.0 release may not be abundant in new features, but it surely adds value to your everyday Kyma experience. We have put a lot of effort in securing all the communication inside the Kyma cluster to make Kyma even more stable and secure. These improvements, along with the resolved issues, will make the development even smoother and more enjoyable.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! With the 1.0 Gliwice release, we have successfully reached our first big release milestone in Kyma. We realize that some of you might be confused and ask "Why Gliwice?" or "Where even is that place?" A quick Wikipedia search reveals that Gliwice is a Polish city situated in the southern part of the country, in the Upper Silesia. Founded in the 13th century, it has a rich history, a beautiful old town, and a river running right through its heart. From the software point of view, Gliwice is the home of the SAP Labs office which has most of the developers working on Kyma. Now that the naming conundrum is solved, let's dive into the details of our first production release.

The 0.9 release comes with many updates and improvements, as well as some brand new features that make the Kyma experience even smoother. The Kyma-Knative integration has reached its peak and from this release, Knative Eventing is the default eventing mechanism. You can now install Kyma on GKE and AKS clusters using the default DNS solution provided by xip.io. Among many updates and improvements, we developed a new testing framework and updated the entire Monitoring stack. Last but not least, we introduced a brand new component for storing and managing content - the Headless CMS.

The Knative Working Group (WG) focused on bringing together the worlds of Kyma and Knative closed (not so) recently. After two months of hard work, the group achieved all of its goals, not without cutting the initial scope, though.

Next destination? Florence! Time to pack our bags and prepare to leave Edmonton and fly all the way to Tuscany for the next Kyma release - 0.9 Florence. What's in store for this Italian-themed release?

The 0.8 release is packed with new features and improvements that bring your experience to a new level. The Kyma-Knative integration continues, making it now possible to both publish and consume Events using Knative Eventing. You can now back up a Kyma cluster manually or schedule periodic backups. The Minikube version constraint is removed, allowing you to use any compatible Minikube version. The Application Connector got even more powerful with certificate signing, renewal, and revocation, as well as a brand new information endpoint. Other significant improvements include replacing OK Log with Grafana Loki, switching all Console views to SAP Fiori Fundamentals, and the introduction of the kyma-developer role.

As you know, a vibrant community of individuals stands behind the Kyma open-source project. They collaborate through Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs), just like it is done in Kubernetes. Additionally, both SIGs and WGs facilitate technical discussions, proposals, and contributions. They also ensure Kyma is a welcoming community for all contributors. The WGs facilitate discussions and work on short-lived, specific topics that either result from the work of SIG groups or that the community members initiate directly.

We keep our promises here at Kyma. With the 4-week release cycle in full swing, it's time to shed some light on the next release named after the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta, located on the North Saskatchewan River. What can you expect from Kyma 0.8 Edmonton?

The 0.7 release brings you features and improvements to further enhance your Kyma experience. The alpha version of the Asset Store component gives you a solution for storing assets, such as documents, files, images, or API specifications. The ongoing CI development resulted in new pipelines which you can use to run Kyma installation and intercept any installation-related issues. The Kyma-Knative integration continues, making it possible to publish Events using Knative Eventing. Other significant improvements allow you to install Kyma on AKS, keep your resources secure with the new security model, and benefit from smoother and simplified Kyma deployment process.

We might have just reached Cairo, but it's not time to celebrate yet. We embark on our ships and ride the wave straight to our next destination - Dublin! The capital of Ireland was chosen to be the codename for the upcoming Kyma 0.7 release which is scheduled to launch on 11th February 2019. Only 4 weeks after the 0.6 release! We're pretty excited and proud about how we improved our tooling and release process, which allows us to release more frequently. Thanks to these improvements, starting with the Dublin release, we will release a new version of Kyma every 4 weeks.

What can you expect at the end of the rainbow?

The 0.6 release brings a lot of significant changes to Kyma. The main focus of this release was to finalize the work on Prow and replace the existing CI pipeline with the new architecture. Thus, we are excited to announce that Kyma finally uses an open-source CI tool and that Kyma 0.6 Cairo was already built using the Prow architecture. Apart from Prow, we made efforts to drive the Kyma-Knative integration forward, took further steps to modularize Kyma components and unify their naming, and significantly improved the website-related user experience.

Explore the changes, try out the release, and get back to us with feedback and contribution!

With winter holidays and 2019 around the corner, let's think about something hotter and more exotic. A city perhaps... Cairo? Sounds good, right?

If you're wondering what does Cairo have to do with Kyma, we're happy to explain. We decided that new releases need a cool common identification theme. After a long, coffee-fuelled brainstorming session we decided to name our releases after major cities in the world. Cool, right?

Soooo... What can you expect from Kyma 0.6 Cairo?

From the early stages of its development, Kyma has raised interest among other companies. The main reasons for that were Kyma's existing open-source technologies that constitute its cornerstone, and the fact that it allows companies to extend and customize their enterprise applications using serverless computing or microservice architecture.

As you may already know, the KubeCon conference, known among the whole Kubernetes and CNCF community, is taking place in Seattle on December 10. This one-liner intro already clarifies why we, the Kyma people, want to be there too. Our main focus is:

• To meet you, show you what Kyma is, and answer all your questions
• Meet with other communities. For now, we are planning to meet with the Kubernetes' Testing SIG and the Service Catalog SIG and talk about our future contributions.

We constantly work improving Kyma and modularizing it further. Shortly after our last release, we now introduce the next update including many changes.

Is Tesla Model X still a car, or is it a smart device? This might sound like a silly question, as the Model X has all of the usual "car" traits: an engine, metal bodywork, rims, tires, etc. On paper, the Model X might look like yet another car, but its uniqueness, aside from the electric engine, of course, lies in the software innovation that Tesla brings to the market. The ability to update the onboard software over-the-air and bring new features and functionalities to a car is a key factor that attracts consumers to buy Teslas. This revolution shows that innovation, even in industries as old as car manufacturing, is an important and powerful tool that allows to penetrate the market faster. Many of the leading car manufacturers are still trying to catch up with Tesla's success. Businesses need to leverage new technologies, take on innovations and transform digitally to be competitive. Simply put - innovate or perish!

It has been a while since we introduced Kyma to the open-source community. Many things have changed in the project since its announcement in July. Now that we have our first official release, it is time to sum up what we have recently worked on.

SAP TechEd is the premier SAP technology conference, which takes place every year on 3 continents and is an excellent source of news on the technical and platform offerings of SAP. In 2018 the conference venues are located in Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Bangalore.

Knative is an important new project in the cloud-native world that was announced as a "Kubernetes-based platform to build, deploy, and manage modern serverless workloads." It is an opinionated approach covering the best practices around three areas of developing cloud-native applications: building containers (and functions), serving (and dynamically scaling) workloads, and eventing. Knative is an open-source set of components and is being actively developed by Google in close partnership with Pivotal, IBM, Red Hat, and SAP.

Now that Kyma is out there available to the world you are most probably keen on testing and implementing your own scenarios leveraging Kyma. Well, we are happy to introduce you to a getting started guide for developers which is a sample application based on Spring Boot showing the features on Kyma.

When Kyma was introduced to the public a few weeks ago at Google Cloud Next ’18, we talked about the strong partnership that we have with the Knative community. Kyma and Knative provide two complementary sets of building blocks, which together offer a powerful framework and a toolset to build cloud-native solutions on top of Kubernetes.

At SAP we typically deal with lots of enterprise software coming from a variety of different vendors. We've helped many of our customers and partners in all industries to model software to their needs and unique business processes. To meet the desire for flexibility, we see a growing demand for openness and modern architecture in this space. That's why we decided to spin the development of our new extension framework, Kyma, out in open source. We’d like to encourage all of you to take a look, get involved and lend a hand to expand Kyma to cover even more exciting extension scenarios.