Week Ending January 18, 2026

Developer News

SIG Windows is nominating Yuanliang Zhang and Jose Valdes as the new co-chairs. Aravindh Puthiyaparambil and Mark Rossetti will be stepping down from their roles as co-chairs while Mark Rossetti will continue on as technical lead. Thank you for your service and congrats to the newly elected chairs!

Patrick Ohly has proposed to spin down WG Structured Logging since most of the work has moved to different SIGs now. Thanks everyone who has helped modernizing logging in Kubernetes!

The SIG Node KEP Wrangling program is looking for volunteers for the v1.36 release. Sign up if you’re interested to work with KEP authors and SIG leads to ensure that deadlines are met and KEPs progress in a timely manner for the v1.36 release. Please reach out in the #sig-node-wranglers channel in Slack if you have any questions.

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: PRR Freeze, February 4

Kubernetes v1.36 call for enhancements is open! If you want your KEP to go in the v1.36 cycle, talk to your SIG leads and get the lead-opted-in label. Make sure that your KEP meets the PRR freeze requirements before February 4th.

The January 2026 patch releases remain delayed since the Go team issued new security releases, and the team is now wrapping up the necessary updates before cutting the patches.

Featured PRs

• 136086: Graduate watch_list_duration_seconds to Beta

This PR graduates the watch_list_duration_seconds metric from Alpha to Beta, signaling stability and long-term support. The metric provides improved observability into watch list performance and is now suitable for broader production use and alerting.

• 136117: Add utilities to allow strategy.go files to enable DV native validations

This PR adds utilities that allow Kubernetes API strategy implementations to opt into Declarative Validation (DV) native rules. It strengthens API correctness by ensuring declarative validations are consistently enforced for new APIs while preserving feature gate semantics.

KEP of the Week

KEP-5295: Introducing KYAML, a safer, less ambiguous YAML subset / encoding

This KEP proposes introducing KYAML, a new kubectl output format that is a strict, safer subset of YAML designed to avoid common YAML pitfalls. KYAML is not whitespace-sensitive, making it easier to edit and patch reliably, especially in tools like Helm. The proposal also recommends making KYAML the standard format for Kubernetes documentation and examples. The motivation is to reduce errors caused by indentation, implicit type coercion, and other confusing YAML behaviors while still remaining compatible with existing YAML tooling.

This KEP graduated to beta in v1.35.

Other Merges

• Fix log verbosity level in apiserver
• client-go: fake client-go (i.e. anything using k8s.io/client-go/testing) now supports separate List+Watch calls
• Drop TopologyAwareHints and ServiceTraficDistribution feature gates
• kubeadm: waiting for etcd learner member to be started before promoting during ‘kubeadm join’
• client-go: Informer resync processing improved handling of Resync handling
• Fix scheduler_unschedulable_pods metric leak when pods fail PreEnqueue plugins
• kubctl: Change the default debug profile from legacy to general
• Add Declarative Validation to Workload API
• kubectl: Fix deleting multiple StatefulSet pods to exit normally
• Add the appProtocol field to the service describe output
• kubelet: Fix data race in volume manager during concurrent pod unmount operations
• client-go: Informers now update store state before calling handlers, ensuring handlers see consistent resource versions
• Scheduler: PreBind plugins can now run in parallel to improve binding latency.

Promotions

• watch_list_duration_seconds to beta

Version Updates

• Go to 1.25.6
• golang.org/x/crypto to v0.47.0
• github.com/golang-jwt/jwt/v5 to v5.3.0
• golang.org/x/net to v0.49.0
• go.uber.org/zap to v1.27.1
• github.com/godbus/dbus/v5 to v5.2.2

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

• node-readiness-controller released v0.1.1 with initial implementation of the Node Readiness Controller
• Controller-Runtime released v0.23.0. Highlights include subresource Apply support, conversion webhook implementation being possible outside of api packages, the PriorityQueue being enabled by default and enabling generic Validators and Defaulters in the webhook.
• coreDNS v1.14.1 focuses on security fixes for vulnerabilities in older Go versions, improves proxy plugin performance with multiplexed connections, and includes documentation updates.
• cluster-api v1.12.2 adds Kubernetes support up to v1.35.x, includes several ControlPlane, ClusterClass, and Runtime SDK fixes, and updates Go and core dependencies.
• cluster-api v1.11.5 extends support to v1.34.x with targeted fixes in ControlPlane, ClusterClass, KCP permissions, and Runtime SDK cert rotation.
• kompose v1.38.0 focuses on maintenance, with dependency updates, CI improvements, and bug fixes, including better macOS and Podman test compatibility.
• openstack-cloud-controller-manager 2.34.2 and openstack-cinder-csi 2.34.2 update the Helm charts for the OpenStack Cloud Controller Manager and Cinder CSI driver, respectively.

Shoutouts

• Josh Berkus: Kudos to @Swathi Rao for doing a great job organizing comms to publicize the NCO.
• Swathi Rao: Shoutout to @Avni for reaching out to SIGs for good first issues and curating them. We got some great responses from 3 this month!

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