We are releasing a patch release for Contour to address a significant performance improvement recently identified by @mattmoor (Thanks Matt!) All previous versions of Contour are affected, and users should upgrade as soon as they can.

When Contour ingests Kubernetes objects it builds a data model (called "the DAG" internally), and once the data model is built, it is used to update status of HTTPProxy objects and to configure the Envoys.

Previous to this release, when the HTTPProxy status updates were sent, they would block the completion of the DAG run, and thus the programming of Envoy. In addition, the way Contour was sending the updates generated more apiserver traffic that it needed to, and could very easily hit apiserver rate-limiting, causing large groups of status updates to add minutes to the DAG reconcilation time (and thus the Envoy programming time).

This release should produce performance improvements in all Contour installations, but they will probably be most noticeable in big clusters with lots of churn.

Extra Changes included

@mattmoor: Replace uncached Get to fix knative-sandbox/net-contour#226 (#2865)

@youngnick: internal/k8s: Change StatusUpdaterHandler channel to buffered (#2867)

Contour 1.8.0 Release Notes

We are delighted to present version 1.8.0 of Contour, our layer 7 HTTP reverse proxy for Kubernetes clusters.

There's been a bunch of great contributions from our community for this release, thanks to everyone!

We've also been busy with some big refactors to testing and other internals. The testing changes have come in, but the others should start being landed in the 1.9 timeframe. So this release is a stablisation release. Yay for paying down some tech debt!

Deprecations

Currently Contour supports annotating various objects with either projectcontour.io/<something> or contour.heptio.com/<something>. As of this release, contour.heptio.com annotations are deprecated, will have a warning log, and will be removed in a future release. Please move to using projectcontour.io annotations.

Inclusive Language changes

To ensure our community is as welcoming as possible, we've migrated our main development branch from its old name of master to main. As part of this effort, the auto-built Docker Hub image tag has also been moved from master to main.

Moving forward, we'll be using the guidelines of the Kubernetes Naming working group as a base for our own efforts to stay as inclusive as we can manage.

As part of this work, we've also run some automated checks against our code base using the vale tool, with minimal changes.

New and Improved

• Contour's fix for 421 redirects and SNI now handles misdirected requests case insensitively (#2764)
• There have a been a few improvements to Contour's shutdown behavior: @laurovenancio has fixed some bugs with the contour shutdown command for managing Envoy's shutdown process (#2817 and #2820), and there was a fix to ensure that Ctrl-C will actually shut down Contour when running locally (#2797).
• @ffahri added some helpers for retrieving the version of Kubernetes objects, and fixed an erroneous log (#2808).
• @tsaarni added upstream certificate validation for HTTP/2 (#2832).
• Contour now parses its YAML configuration strictly. Thanks @tthebst for PR #2765.
• Some great docs fixes from @derkoe (#2790), @rajat404 (#2804), and @tong101 (#2839).
• @aberasarte had a design proposal for CORS accepted (#1012), after a long and detailed discussion. We're all looking forward to seeing this design implemented.

Thanks to all of our external contributors, this is the most ever in one release! 🥇 🎉

Upgrading

Please consult the upgrade documentation.

Are you a Contour user? We would love to know!

If you're using Contour and want to add your organization to our adopters list, please visit this page. If you prefer to keep your organization name anonymous but still give us feedback into your usage and scenarios for Contour, please post on this GitHub thread.