Week Ending March 01, 2026

Developer News

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Release Schedule

Next Deadline: Code & Test Freeze, 19th March 2026

Code and Test Freeze for v1.36 is coming up. All feature work must be completed and merged before the freeze. After this point, only critical bug fixes will be considered, and approved exceptions will be required for any additional changes.

Out-of-band patch releases v1.35.2, v1.34.5, v1.33.9, and v1.32.13 were published last week, built with Go 1.25.7 / 1.24.13 and including fixes for recent CVEs.

Additionally, Kubernetes v1.36.0-alpha.2 is now live and built with Go 1.25.7.

KEP of the Week

KEP-5004: DRA: Handle extended resource requests via DRA Driver

Extended resources offer a simple and concise way to represent resource capacity and consumption, whereas Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) provides greater flexibility and expressiveness at the cost of added complexity. This KEP proposes a mechanism for cluster administrators to advertise dynamic resources defined in ResourceSlice as extended resources through DeviceClass. It allows application developers and operators to continue requesting resources using the familiar extended resource model. At the same time, it supports dynamic allocation for requests made via either extended resources or DRA resource claims. The proposal ensures that existing applications can run without modification. It also enables both application teams and cluster administrators to adopt DRA gradually, including scenarios where device plugins and DRA drivers coexist on different nodes for the same hardware.

This KEP graduated to alpha in v1.35.

Other Merges

• Rename AllowlistEntry.Name to AllowlistEntry.Command in the credential plugin allowlist.
• Add the ability for statefulset controller to read its own pod and pvc writes
• kubeadm: Do not add learner member to etcd client endpoints
• Prevent the replicaset controller from spuriously reconciling while its own writes have not been read.
• Add the ability for the job controller to read its own writes
• Allow kube-apiserver to recover from an accidentally made connection to a wrong server.
• Fixed apiserver startup failure during upgrade when MultiCIDRServiceAllocator is enabled and the cluster has a large number of namespaces.
• Fixed /metrics/resource container_swap_usage_bytes to report the correct container swap usage.
• Adds alpha metrics apiserver_peer_proxy_errors_total and apiserver_peer_discovery_sync_errors_total to apiserver to track errors encountered in peer proxying and peer discovery.
• Instrument /flagz and /statusz endpoints with apiserver request metrics (apiserver_request_total, apiserver_request_duration_seconds), with group and version labels reflecting the content-negotiated API version.

Promotions

• customUnique,eachKey,ifDisabled,ifEnabled,immutable,unique,update to Beta
• StrictIPCIDRValidation to Beta
• MutableCSINodeAllocatableCount to GA
• statusz API to Beta
• Mixed Version Proxy (UnknownVersionInteroperabilityProxy) to Beta

Version Updates

• etcd sdk to v3.6.8

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

• Prometheus v3.10.0: introduces a new distroless Docker image variant for improved security, adds PromQL fill() modifiers and OpenAPI 3.2 API specification support, improves service discovery modularity via build tags, and delivers multiple performance improvements and bug fixes across PromQL, TSDB, OTLP ingestion, and the web UI.
• CRI-O patch releases: v1.35.1 adds TLS configuration options for streaming and metrics servers and fixes systemd container cgroup permission issues with user namespaces; also v1.34.6 and v1.33.10 provide maintenance updates and bug fixes across supported release branches.
• cloud-provider-aws v1.32.6: updates the AWS Go SDK and dependencies for CVE fixes, adds support for a new AWS partition in the credential provider, upgrades Go to v1.24.9, and includes improvements to e2e load balancer test scenarios and debugging.
• cluster-autoscaler-chart v9.56.0: publishes an updated Helm chart for deploying Cluster Autoscaler aligned with the latest autoscaler packaging.
• vertical-pod-autoscaler-chart v0.8.1: updates the Helm chart used to deploy Vertical Pod Autoscaler components in Kubernetes clusters.
• kubebuilder v4.13.0: adds Helm plugin support for overriding manager environment variables via CLI flags, upgrades cert-manager used in e2e tests, fixes lint execution and Helm chart templating issues, resolves CLI plugin flag conflicts, and standardizes generated file permissions and YAML formatting.

Shoutouts

LMKTFY: Thanks to @Prasanth Baskar for implementing dedicated web pages for each KEP, bringing together the rendered KEP, tracking issue, and related links in one place to make enhancements easier to navigate and track. *