There are numerous useful metrics and insights provided by kube-state-metrics right out of the box! These metrics can be used to serve as an insight into your cluster: Either through metrics alone, in the form of dashboards, or through an alerting pipeline. To provide a few examples:

• kube_pod_container_status_restarts_total can be used to alert on a crashing pod.
• kube_deployment_status_replicas which together with kube_deployment_status_replicas_available can be used to alert on whether a deployment is rolled out successfully or stuck.
• kube_pod_container_resource_requests and kube_pod_container_resource_limits can be used in capacity planning dashboards.

So now that we know what kube-state-metrics is, we are excited to announce the next release: kube-state-metrics v2.0! This release was long-awaited and started with an alpha release in September 2020. To ease maintenance we removed tech debt and also adjusted some confusing wording around user-facing flags and APIs. We also removed some metrics that caused unnecessarily high cardinality in Prometheus! For the 2.0 release, we took the time to set up scale and performance testing. This allows us to better understand if we hit any issues in large clusters and also to document resource request recommendations for your clusters. In this release (and v1.9.8) container builds providing support for multiple architectures were introduced allowing you to run kube-state-metrics on ARM, ARM64, PPC64 and S390x as well!

So without further ado, here is the list of more noteworthy user-facing breaking changes. A full list of changes, features and bug fixes is available in the changelog at the end of this post.