Week Ending October 26, 2025

Developer News

The steering committee election voting period closed last week. The results will be announced in the public steering meeting next Wednesday.

Some reminders for folks attending KubeCon NA 2025 about the Kubernetes Contributor Hour and the SIG/WG Meet and Greet

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: Code Freeze, 7th November

With the feature blog freeze in place, KEP assignees are expected to open placeholder PRs for their blogs. Please reach out to the Release Comms team for more information. We’re one week away from the v1.35 code freeze. Get your PRs ready and don’t forget to file an early exception if you anticipate any delays!

October patch releases have been skipped altogether.

KEP of the Week

KEP-5007: DRA: Device Binding Conditions

This KEP introduces BindingConditions, enabling the scheduler to delay Pod binding until external resources such as fabric-attached GPUs or FPGAs are confirmed ready. This improves scheduling reliability by preventing premature bindings that could lead to Pod failures or require manual intervention. The mechanism also supports asynchronous or failure-prone scenarios, including remote accelerators and FPGA reprogramming.

This KEP is tracked for beta in v1.35.

Other Merges

DRA resources use eachKey declarative validation to mirror map-key checks and keep generated DV in sync with handwritten rules
CSI NodePublishVolumeRequest now carries pod service account tokens in the gRPC secrets field instead of volume_context
DRA DeviceAttribute now declares its non-discriminated union with +k8s:unionMember, so declarative validation can enforce “exactly one value set”
Add +k8s:maxLength (and +k8s:optional) to NetworkDeviceData so generated DV can cap interfaceName / hardwareAddress lengths and match handwritten validation
Wire storage.k8s.io (StorageClass) into declarative validation and mark provisioner as +k8s:required, so generated DV now matches the old handwritten strategy on create/update
StorageVersionMigration (SVM) graduates to v1beta1 and drops the old v1alpha1/unused fields, so clusters must clean up any storage.k8s.io/v1alpha1 SVM objects before upgrading
kubectl finally drops support for the long-deprecated certificates.k8s.io/v1beta1 CertificateSigningRequest.
Add mtlsclient and mtlsserver for the mtls validations
apiserver cacher’s lister_watcher now exposes WatchList semantics
Enable declarative validation for resource.k8s.io ResourceSlice (v1/v1beta1/v1beta2)
Introduce pod queuing in endpoint/slice controllers
Add k8s-resource-fully-qualified-name format
Implements synthetic create authz permission check for exec, attach, and portforward
Enable Declarative Validation(DV) support for ClusterRole and RoleBinding
Replace HandleCrash and HandleError calls to use context-aware alternative
Bump supported etcd version to v3.5.24 for release v1.32, v1.33, and v1.3

Promotions

Version Updates

etcd sdk to v3.6.5
system-validators to v1.12.1

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

containerd v2.2.0-rc.0 (pre-release) adds a mount manager, supports conf.d includes in the default config, and adds back-references in the garbage collector. It improves CRI with ListPodSandboxMetrics and image-volume subpaths, adds parallel image unpack and a referrers fetcher, updates EROFS snapshotter, enables OTEL traces and WASM plugin support in NRI, speeds shim reloads, and postpones some deprecations to 2.3.
containerd API v1.10.0-rc.0 (pre-release) aligns with containerd 2.2, introducing the mount manager and parallel unpack support in the API.
prometheus v3.7.3 fixes a UI redirect regression with -web.external-url and -web.route-prefix, corrects federation for some native histograms, fixes a promtool check config failure when --lint=none is set, and resolves a remote-write queue resharding deadlock.

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