Palette 4.8: Karpenter, LXD, Crossplane, Tigera and more

It feels like a long time since we announced Palette 4.7, way back in July — and in that time, the pace hasn’t slowed. 

We’ve introduced PaletteAI, achieved FIPS 140-3 validation and FedRAMP, and continued to deliver innovation across the Palette platform in our interim releases.

Now, with the release of Palette 4.8 this past weekend, it’s time to take a breath, pop a cork, and look at what’s new.

As always, there are dozens of quality-of-life improvements, performance optimizations, and bug fixes, but here are the highlights that really stand out — the ones shaping the future of how enterprises manage Kubernetes at scale.

Smarter scaling for EKS with Karpenter

Cost control remains a constant conversation in every platform engineering team. That’s why we’ve introduced full support for Karpenter, an open-source Kubernetes autoscaler that provisions nodes in real time based on actual workload demand. By provisioning just-in-time compute and consolidating underused nodes, Karpenter helps platform teams cut cloud waste and improve workload elasticity.

With Palette’s verified Karpenter pack, teams can deploy, observe, and manage Karpenter directly within the Palette lifecycle — bringing consistency, visibility, and governance to the same autoscaling technology many EKS users already love.

The result: smoother scale-to-zero, better node utilization, and fewer idle resources driving up cloud bills.

Bare metal efficiency: LXD-based control planes for MAAS

Bare metal Kubernetes has always been a core strength for Palette users, but one challenge has persisted: provisioning control-plane nodes on large physical servers can waste compute capacity.

Now we’ve solved this with virtualized control planes for MAAS, powered by Canonical LXD. Platform teams can now pool multiple virtualized control plane nodes on one or more physical hosts, ensure high availability and free up more bare-metal horsepower for workloads.

The impact is especially meaningful for customers modernizing in place — healthcare, manufacturing, and government — who rely on MAAS to bring cloud-like efficiency to on-prem environments.

(If this ‘bare metal slicing’ seems like a familiar concept, you may be remembering this CNCF online session we did way back in February 2024)

Modern composability: Crossplane v2 support

Back in 2023 we shared our excitement for Crossplane, and now, with its recent graduation from the CNCF, and the release of v2 back in the summer, it’s a perfect time to revisit why it matters.

Crossplane v2 simplifies the operator experience with namespaced resources, cleaner APIs, and stronger alignment with Kubernetes conventions. Palette’s full Crossplane v2 support brings those benefits directly into managed clusters, enabling platform teams to build their own declarative “control planes” for cloud infrastructure — faster, safer, and more portable than ever.

Simpler inputs, safer operations: dropdown profile variables

Managing cluster profiles has always been about balance — giving teams flexibility without introducing risk. Palette 4.8 now adds dropdown input support for cluster profile variables, letting platform engineers define allowed values instead of free text.

This small but mighty change reduces configuration errors, enforces standards, and makes Day 0 and Day 2 operations friendlier for less experienced users. It’s part of our ongoing investment in operator experience: fewer YAML edits, more guardrails, and more confidence.

Security and compliance built in: FIPS-compiled Ubuntu 22.04 in CanvOS

With Palette 4.8, our CanvOS tool now supports FIPS-compiled Ubuntu 22.04 as a base OS for building edge appliances — a critical milestone for users in regulated industries.

Because of licensing rules, we can’t ship fully hardened OS images directly. But this release gives you the same scripts and build process our own VerteX Management Appliance uses, making it easy to clone, harden, and customize your images to meet FIPS 140-3 and STIG standards.

It’s one more step toward simplifying compliance without sacrificing control.

Enhanced networking and observability: verified Tigera Operator

Since day one, Palette has offered a verified Calico CNI pack to provide robust, policy-driven networking for Kubernetes clusters. With Palette 4.8, we’re expanding that foundation through a verified Tigera Operator pack — delivering a full operator-managed Calico deployment experience.

The Tigera Operator manages Calico through Kubernetes custom resources instead of static manifests, simplifying lifecycle management and enabling advanced features such as the Calico API Server, enhanced flow logs, and projectcalico.org/v3 Network Policies.

This means customers can now achieve richer network visibility, more granular policy control, and better alignment with upstream Calico best practices — all within the same familiar Palette experience.

Together, these improvements make it easier for platform teams to maintain consistent network security and visibility across environments — whether clusters run in vSphere, edge, or public cloud.

Early look: Apache CloudStack integration (tech preview)

One of the most intriguing updates in 4.8 is the tech-preview support for Apache CloudStack as a new cloud provider for Palette.

CloudStack is an open-source IaaS platform popular with MSPs and service providers thanks to its simplicity and flexibility. With this integration, Palette customers can now provision and manage Kubernetes clusters directly on CloudStack.

Note that as with all our tech preview features, we do not recommend use in production environments.

Why it all matters

Taken together, these features tell a clear story. Palette 4.8 is about choice and control, giving teams more ways to deploy Kubernetes securely, more confidence in how it scales and stays compliant, and more room to innovate without friction.

Whether you’re running air-gapped clusters at the edge, virtualized control planes in your data center, or multi-cloud fleets in AWS and Azure, Palette 4.8 helps you do it all with consistency, visibility, and trust.

Check out the full Palette 4.8 release notes, or if you’re a current Spectro Cloud customer on our SaaS instances, log in to your console to see the updates in action.