Week Ending November 02, 2025

Developer News

The 2025 Steering Committee Election results are announced. Congratulations to Kat Cosgrove, Paco Xu, Rita Zhang and Maciej Szulik for being elected for their 2 year term in the steering committee. Maciej and Paco are returning steering committee members. Thank you to all the candidates and all the community members for voting. An election retro call is happening on 19th November, 8AM PT. If you have any feedback about the steering elections this year, please add it to the retro doc.

WG-LTS is winding down after the conclusion from all the discussions that a community supported LTS within the Kubernetes project is probably not the right answer. The Compatibility Versions feature is cited as an alternative for safer upgrades.

The Kustomize project is seeking proposals for a new logo. If you have any ideas for a new logo, do post it in the open issue!

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: Code Freeze, 7th November

The code freeze and test freeze deadline is on Friday 7th November 2025, 12:00 UTC. Please open an early exception for your KEP if you think you need more time!

Kubernetes v1.35.0-alpha.3 is live.

Featured PRs

[KEP-4330] add min-compatibility-version to control plane

This PR is part of a larger effort to introduce “compatibility versions” to control plane components and features, eventually permitting upgrades and rollbacks that span more than one Kubernetes version safely. This PR adds the field to apiserver, controller-manager, and scheduler.

KEP of the Week

KEP-4827: Component Statusz

As part of Kubernetes march towards structured data for everything, this KEP introduces a structured, standardized endpoint for health and status checking. It will enhance observability and enable building new monitoring and performance tools. Statusz is kicking off with v1alpha1 in 1.35

Other Merges

• New k8s-resource-fully-qualified-name format for Declarative Validation
• Enhance several different E2E tests (plus many more, kudos Lukasz Szaszkiewicz) to support EnableWatchListClient
• CRD Conditions include an ObservedGeneration to deter race conditions
• DRA APIs: migrate several [DRA validations] (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/134963), use EachKey to map resources, make DeviceAttribute a Union type,
• New tests to support Deployments terminating pods during Recreate and RollingUpdate
• Benchmarking Shared Informers now
• Allow some kubeadm functions to be exported
• Support Declarative Validation for StorageClass
• Use informer.RunWithContext in controller tests
• Test stepwise volume expansion
• Prevent AllocationMode: All failure
• Allow DRA to process inactive workloads with Allocatable=0
• ContextualLogging migrations: cpumanager
• JWKS fetch metrics for structured authentication
• Pod Generation E2E tests promoted to conformance

Promotions

• KUBECTL_COMMAND_HEADERS to GA
• InPlacePodVerticalScaling to GA
• StorageVersionMigration to beta
• SystemWatchdog to GA
• MutableCSINodeAllocatableCount to beta
• DeploymentReplicaSetTerminatingReplicas to beta

Deprecated

• BlockOwnerDeletion is removed from resource claims
• Stop providing taint keys in Pod statuses when scheduling fails
• DynamicResourceAllocation feature gate locked on; will be removed in a few releases
• Remove kubelet --pod-infra-container-image switch

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

• containerd v2.2.0-rc.0 (pre-release) introduces a mount manager, adds conf.d include support in the default configuration, and supports back references in the garbage collector. It improves CRI with ListPodSandboxMetrics and image-volume subpaths, adds parallel image unpack and referrers fetcher, updates the EROFS snapshotter, enables OpenTelemetry traces and WASM plugin support in NRI, improves shim reload performance, and postpones v2.2 deprecations to v2.3.
• nerdctl v2.2.0-rc.0 fixes a namestore directory regression, adds mount-manager support, and introduces new checkpoint commands (create, ls, rm). It adds a --estargz-gzip-helper flag for image conversion and updates bundled dependencies, including containerd v2.2.0-rc.0, runc v1.3.2, BuildKit v0.25.1, and Stargz Snapshotter v0.18.0.
• cloud-provider-vsphere v1.33.1 updates CAPI to v1.10.1 and CAPV to v1.13.0, enables weekly security checks, updates API calls to use FQDN, and fixes Service deletion when VirtualMachineService is not found. It also bumps Kubernetes to v1.33.5 and refreshes documentation.
• cloud-provider-vsphere v1.32.3 provides dependency updates across test suites, upgrades controller-runtime to v0.19.6 and govmomi to v0.46.3, introduces weekly security checks, and fixes VirtualMachineService deletion. It also adopts FQDN for Supervisor API calls and includes CVE patches.
• vsphere-cpi-chart-1.33.1 and vsphere-cpi-chart-1.32.3 update Helm charts for vSphere CPI to align with recent vSphere provider releases.
• ingress-nginx helm-chart-4.14.0, 4.13.4, and 4.12.8 deliver updated Helm charts for the NGINX ingress controller with alignment to current controller and Kubernetes versions.
• cluster-autoscaler v1.30.7 backports the OCI CloudProvider feature to the v1.30 line and publishes multi-architecture images (v1.30.7).
• prometheus v3.7.3 fixes a UI redirect regression involving -web.external-url and -web.route-prefix, resolves federation issues for some native histograms, corrects promtool check config failures when --lint=none is specified, and eliminates a remote-write queue resharding deadlock.

Shoutouts

• Sreeram Venkitesh - Shoutout to everyone who helped run the 2025 steering committee elections smoothly - The EOs and alternate EOs: @cblecker @Nina Polshakova @Arujjwal @Rey Lejano, K8s infra liaison @mahamed, and @jberkus for all the support from the very beginning and also for helping us with Elekto. Also big thanks to all the previous (and continuing) steering committee members for their support in making the election a smooth and successful one. Thank you all!

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