Today I learned that OKD, the free software version of Red Hat OpenShift, is basically a dead Kubernetes distribution for everyone who doesn’t have a Red Hat subscription. When looking at it, there is the “stable” version 3.11.0 and the “preview” version 4.x. So while you are not supposed to use the 4.x version of OKD anywhere in production, the 3.11 version got its last release in October 2018. And there are no plans to improve this situation. Means if you want to run OKD, you have to maintain it yourself, which makes the whole idea of an Kubernetes distribution obsolete. In other words: Pay Red Hat or do it yourself. And I don’t think it’s worth the pain.

At work I was checking something in the documentation and was wondering how big the difference between OKD 3.11 and OpenShift 3.11. After checking the GitHub repository and seeing the mentioned latest release, I wanted to dig a bit further and came across an issue asking if there are any plans to provide a newer release. There is no actual answer in the issue and it was simply closed by bots for being stale.

If you look for an SELinux-aware Kubernetes distribution, might check K3s. It’s not perfect but at least they provide up-to-date stable releases without a subscription.