Week Ending August 31, 2025

Developer News

The Kubernetes Steering Committee 2025 election is open for four seats. Candidate nominations are due by September 8 and voting begins on September 10. Voting will be conducted through Elekto using GitHub login, where you can also verify your voter eligibility. The election ends October 24, and results will be announced on November 5.

Equinix Metal platform will shut down on June 30, 2026, so SIG Cloud Provider will deprecate cloud-provider-equinix-metal. The repo will be updated to Kubernetes 1.34, maintained with fixes and tests, and archived after the 1.37 release.

The KubeCon North America 2025 Maintainer Summit schedule is out.

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: 1.35 Release Cycle Starts, September

We are between release cycles right now. The 1.35 cycle will start in September. Watch the Dev mailing list for the call for release shadows.

The cherry-pick deadline for the next set of patch releases is this Friday.

Featured PRs

132798: Show simple values in validation rule failures

This PR improves error messages from CEL validation in CRDs; Previously, failures displayed the field type (for example, “string”) instead of the value that caused the failure; Now, when the value is a number, boolean, or string, the error message shows that value; This makes validation errors clearer and easier to understand.

133323: Make kubectl auth reconcile retry on conflict

This PR improves the kubectl auth reconcile command; Before, if the command tried to update an object and hit a conflict (for example, because another change happened at the same time), it would fail right away; Now, it retries when a conflict occurs, making the command more reliable when multiple updates happen concurrently.

Other Merges

• Use consistent documentation of aliases in API
• Improve shell completion for api resources
• Drop experimental prefix from kubectl wait command
• Remove ListType marker from non-list field
• Move GetAffinityTerms functions to staging repo
• kube proxy iptables logging now displays correctly
• PodFailurePolicy conditions no longer require explicit status
• Add resourceClaimModified to bindClaim update assume cache
• Gate Storage version migration behind RealFIFO to prevent possible race conditions.
• Improve godoc by enabling accurate deprecation warnings
• Validate flush frequency is positive
• Skip PreEnqueue when pod reactivated from backoffQ
• Add conversion for timeoutForControlPlane field
• Optimize calculatePodRequests for specific container lookups
• Make DeleteOptions decode returns 400 instead of 500
• Enable KYAML gate by default
• Improve conversion-gen handling of unexported fields and pointer conversions
• Make kubectl auth reconcile retries on conflict
• Store WithContext ctx in a wrapper to avoid conflict
• Extend applyconfiguration-gen to generate extract functions for all subresources, not just status.
• Report actionable error when GC fails due to disk pressure
• Increment metric for duplicate validation errors
• Remove duplicate RBAC resources update validations
• Prevent race in scheduler integration test
• Resolve kubectl writing current-context to the wrong kubeconfig file when using multiple kubeconfig files
• Enable multiple volume references to a single PVC
• VAC API test to conformance

Deprecated

• Removed deprecated gogo protocol definitions from k8s.io/kubelet/pkg/apis/dra in favor of google.golang.org/protobuf.
• Remove StatefulSetAutoDeletePVC after feature GA-ed in 1.32
• Remove OuterVolumeSpecName from ASW

Version Updates

• Bumped cri-tools to v1.34.0
• Update CoreDNS to v1.12.3

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

• cloud-provider-vSphere v1.34.0 adds daemonset volumes, shared sessions, fixes service/tag issues, and updates Go, CAPI, CAPV, and Kubernetes.
• cluster-apiv1.11.1 extends Kubernetes support to v1.34 for both management and workload clusters
• cluster-api-provider-vsphere v1.14.0 upgrades to CAPI v1.11, Go 1.24, and adds multi-networking for NSX-VPC and vSphere providers
• CRI-O v1.33.4 fixes CNI teardown, validates memory limits, pulls OCI images earlier and adds hostnetwork info
• Ingress-NGINX v1.13.2 fixes nginx_ingress_controller_config_last_reload_successful metrics and hardens socket security; Helm Chart v4.13.2 updates to controller v1.13.2 and bumps Kube Webhook CertGen.
• kind v0.30.0 contains patched dependencies and Kubernetes 1.34, as well as a bugfix for Kubernetes v1.33.0+ cluster reboots
• kOps v1.33.1 adds Debian 13 support, fixes Amazon Linux 2 and CoreDNS issues, and updates Kubernetes hashes

Shoutouts

• Rajalakshmi Girish: A big shout-out to the Kubernetes v1.34 Release Signal Team! @adil @ChengHao Yang (tico88612) @elieser1101 @Prajyot Parab @Sarthak Negi It has been an incredible journey with such a dedicated and committed group throughout this cycle. Experienced members supported and guided the new ones, while the newcomers showed eagerness and openness to learn. This team consistently showed up with the highest attendance in release team calls, whether it was the weekly syncs or burndown meetings. From diligently updating meeting notes, giving timely Go/No-Go signals for release cuts, and collaborating without a hitch, every member stepped up and delivered flawlessly. Despite busy schedules—whether balancing organizational responsibilities or internship commitments, everyone fulfilled their role with remarkable dedication. Our direct chat group reflected the unity and support within the team, always backing each other up whenever needed. Kudos to each of you. I am proud to have led such an energetic, collaborative, and committed team!

• Vyom Yadav: Kubernetes v1.34 is shipped It was an absolute pleasure to be a part of this journey across the ocean, which wouldn’t have been possible without my fellow sailors. Lead Shadows: @Wendy Ha @Sreeram Venkitesh @Ryota @dchan - I felt very comfortable knowing I had y’all to help me steer this ship and proactively check the state of things on your own! Enhancements: @Jenny Shu @Drew Hagen @rayandas @Faeka Ansari @Sean McGinnis @jmickey - Enhancements gets quite busy early on in the cycle and it’s due to your efforts that we’ve 58 strong enhancements this cycle and a very well rounded Kubernetes release. Comms: @aibarbetta @Alejandro Leon @Dipesh @Graziano Casto @Melony Q. (aka.cloudmelon ) - Going through all the enhancements to select a few is quite daunting, especially when there are about 75 of them before the code freeze, y’all did an amazing job highlighting the enhancements we’ve and coordinating with CNCF to get things done on time. Release Signal: @Rajalakshmi Girish @ChengHao Yang (tico88612) @elieser1101 @Prajyot Parab @adil @Sarthak Negi - The flake that we find just before the release cut is always there, but the way you navigated those (and the structure of communication) to not cause any delay to the release is commendable. Docs: @Michelle Nguyen @Urvashi @Arvind Parekh @YuJen Huang(Dylan) @DangerBuff @Rashan - Docs is a team that’s busy during the complete cycle, from enforcing KEPs to have docs to managing release notes, when we’ve inherited some rough winds is a job well done. Branch Management: @Matteo (away until Jan ‘26) @Drew Hagen @Angelos Kolaitis @satyampsoni - Thank you for actually shipping Kubernetes (literally), and all the improvements you have been making to the process. and a very special thank you to @Kat Cosgrove and @fsmunoz for all the guidance and being there, jumping in when I required help, and to all SIG leads, tech leads, contributors for helping us ship this release. I’ve a lot to say about this cycle and the release team. I joined back in v1.27 and every cycle I’ve learned, grown, made friends and just enjoyed myself working to ship one the largest open source projects on this planet which is a no small feat and y’all should be incredibly proud. Feels absolutely nostalgic and I can’t thank everyone enough whom I’ve worked with (this or previous cycles) and it was an honor to be a part of this crew and steering the ship this release (until the next time!)

• Michelle Nguyen: A big shout-out to Kubernetes v1.34 Docs team! @Rashan @Urvashi @Arvind Parekh @YuJen Huang(Dylan) @DangerBuff You all consistently went above and beyond—whether updating meeting notes meticulously, tracking down docs, or supporting each other with krel tasks. Every single person delivered exceptional work without fail. Thanks to you all, our release was smooth, especially from a docs perspective! A special shoutout to @Drew Hagen for helping Docs out during Docs Freeze. You absolutely rock! I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished as a team and am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work alongside everyone.

• Agustina Barbetta: As we wrap up post-release communications for v1.34, I want to give a big shoutout to the Kubernetes v1.34 Comms team: @Dipesh @Graziano Casto @Alejandro Leon @Melony Q. (aka.cloudmelon ) Comms gets more challenging as the cycle progresses, but you’ve consistently stepped up and tackled everything from a quick outreach to major writing tasks. The second half of the cycle saw us publish 2 blogs, one of which highlighted 44 SIG features, while also reviewing 18 Feature Blogs that are currently rolling out. And through it all, we stayed on track with every commitment in the v1.34 timeline. Thank you for making v1.34 communications a huge success!

Last Week In Kubernetes Development (LWKD) is a product of multiple contributors participating in Kubernetes SIG Contributor Experience. All original content is licensed Creative Commons Share-Alike, although linked content and images may be differently licensed. LWKD does collect some information on readers, see our privacy notice for details.

You may contribute to LWKD by submitting pull requests or issues on the LWKD github repo.