Just weeks after Amazon Web Services entered the container-management space with Blox, the leading open-source container-management product, Kubernetes, has moved to version 1.5.

The new version is capable of running a distributed database and is moving toward supporting Windows Server 2016 containers, said Aparna Sinha, a Google senior product manager, in a blog post. A new command-line tool, kubefed, helps set up and manage multi-cluster federations. And a new feature, StatefulSet, helps deal with deleting pods more intelligently. Some of these features are only in alpha or beta within the new release.

Kubernetes, pioneered by Google but hosted and administered by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, remains the best known product to start, stop, monitor and control large fleets of containers. Container technology lets developers bundle up the components of an app to simplify and improve the experience of developing and deploying software.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels didn’t even mention Kubernetes when he introduced Blox at re:Invent in Las Vegas last month. Blox works with the EC2 container serviceSome are calling it a competitive threat to Kubernetes. Yet AWS does support Kubernetes, as does AWS rival Microsoft Azure. Also in the mix are Mesos and Docker Swarm, two other container-management products.

UPDATE: Google is recommending skipping version 1.5 in favor of 1.5.1, set for release later Tuesday, because the earlier version has security issues.

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