With love for cloud-native technologies in our hearts and lots of cool ideas in our minds, we've got through the middle of this snowy and cloudy winter season. Now that we have reached the 2.11 milestone, we can share what we accomplished during this part of the journey. Version 2.11 of Kyma comes with a few exciting improvements, such as Fluent Bit DaemonSet fully managed by the operator, Istio and Fluent Bit upgrades, the new finalizer for APIRule CR, and that is by no means all. Read on to find out the rest of the news.

See the overview of all changes in this release:

• Application Connectivity - encodeUrl parameter
• Observability – Kiali removed, Jaeger deprecated
• Telemetry – Fluent Bit upgraded to version 2.0.8, Fluent Bit DaemonSet fully managed by the operator, improvements for TracePipeline
• API Gateway – improved status handling and CPU reconciling, new finalizer for APIRule CR, APIRule CR conversion bug fixed
• Security – Istio upgraded to version 1.16.2, PodPreset functionality removed
• Eventing – NATS image updated to version 2.9.11

With Kyma 2.11, we introduced the encodeUrl parameter, which allows you to control whether Application Gateway encodes URL characters. Set the parameter to false so that the URL path remains unchanged or to true to enable the encoding. For example, if the encodeUrl is set to true, the /app/api/sample(1%2C2%2C3)%2FescapingURL path changes to /app/api/sample%281%2C2%2C3%29/escaping. When it is set to false, the /app/api/sample(1%2C2%2C3)%2Fescaping path stays intact.

Kiali was deprecated with Kyma 2.8 and removed with Kyma 2.11. If you want to continue using it, follow the steps in the Kiali example to deploy your custom Kiali.

From this Kyma release, the tracing component is deprecated. It will be removed with Kyma 2.14. If you want to continue using Jaeger, follow the steps in the Jaeger example to deploy your custom Jaeger.

To run the Telemetry module as a fully self-contained solution with all the resources managed by the module operator, we introduced a series of changes and improvements. With Kyma 2.11, we completed the process and released Fluent Bit DaemonSet fully managed by the operator. From now, the Fluent Bit installation can be provisioned on-demand only if the user requests a LogPipeline. The Fluent Bit settings are managed by the module operator and can no longer be influenced directly using the module Helm values.

The Fluent Bit DaemonSet got upgraded to the new major version 2. Besides the performance improvements, the 2.0.8 version introduces OTLP support and enables the Kyma team to start working on the official OTLP support for LogPipelines.

We fixed a bug so that the log files are always read from the beginning when starting a Fluent Bit instance on a newly provisioned node.

System traces emitted by Istio, for example, while communicating with the trace-collector, are now filtered out by default. We also added the extension for TracePipelines to Kyma Dashboard and fixed a bug that caused the TracePipeline status not to reflect the status of the managed trace-collector properly.

With version 2.11 of Kyma, we introduced support for custom headers on the OTLP output that enables integrations to providers with native OTLP support, such as Dynatrace.

With this version of API Gateway, we improved the status handling, added the finalizer for APIRule CR, fixed the bug related to APIRule CR conversion, and resolved the reconciling CPU issue for Azure.

With Kyma 2.11, we upgraded Istio 1.16.1 to version 1.16.2. Read the official Istio 1.16.2 release notes to learn more about the changes.

We finally removed the PodPreset functionality that was deprecated with Kyma 2.4. For more information, read the deprecation note.

The NATS-Server image was updated to version 2.9.11. For more details, take a look at the NATS-Server release notes.