Last Week in Kubernetes Development
Stay up-to-date on Kubernetes development in 15 minutes a week.
Week Ending February 8, 2026
Developer News
Next Tuesday is the monthly New Contributor Orientation. Join at one of two times to learn all about starting your contribution journey.
Release Schedule
Next Deadline: Enhancements Freeze, February 11
Kubernetes v1.36.0-alpha.1 is live!
This week is the final Enhancements deadline for 1.36. Any KEP that wishes to join the v1.36 release, must now have an approved Exception.
January and February patch releases are being combined and the patch release is expected this week.
Featured PRs
#136118: Make ExternalServiceAccountTokenSigner GA
This PR graduates the ExternalServiceAccountTokenSigner feature to GA in Kubernetes v1.36 and locks the feature gate to enabled by default. It finalizes support for external signing of service account tokens, allowing kube-apiserver to delegate token signing to external systems via a configured signing endpoint. The graduation follows successful integrations by major cloud providers and feedback from distributions, marking this as a stable and supported authentication mechanism.
#136781: feat(wait): introduce waitOptions.RunWaitContext()
This PR adds RunWaitContext() to kubectl’s wait command implementation, allowing callers to supply a context.Context to control cancellation. This improves composability for tools and integrations that wrap kubectl wait, enabling graceful early exits without relying solely on timeouts. The change enhances kubectl’s internal APIs without altering user-facing behavior.
#136539: feat(ccm): introduce metric route_controller_route_sync_total
This PR introduces a new alpha-stage Cloud Controller Manager metric, route_controller_route_sync_total, which tracks how often routes are synchronized with the cloud provider. The metric supports observability and experimentation around the watch-based route reconciliation feature and provides valuable insight for SIG Cloud Provider and SIG Instrumentation as the feature evolves.
KEP of the Week
This KEP proposes deprecating and ultimately removing cgroup v1 support from the Kubernetes codebase, building on the maintenance-mode transition introduced in KEP-4569. The change will follow a phased approach, starting with a beta phase that prevents kubelet from running on cgroup v1 nodes. While Kubernetes commits to removing cgroup v1–specific code, the exact timeline is not yet finalized, with removal planned no earlier than v1.38 to comply with Kubernetes deprecation policies. This effort aligns Kubernetes with the broader Linux ecosystem’s shift toward cgroup v2, which is the focus of ongoing kernel and system-level innovation.
This KEP graduated to beta in v1.35.
Other Merges
- Cloud Controller Manager now exports the counter metric
- DRA: Implement +k8s:alpha and +k8s:beta
- kube-controller-manager: alpha gauge metrics for informer queue length are now published as
informer_queued_items{name=kube-controller-manager,group=<group>,resource=<resource>,version=<version>} <count> - Fix DeepEqualWithNilDifferentFromEmpty logic so managedFields timestamps update on list/map emptying
Promotions
- RealFIFO to GA
- ExternalServiceAccountTokenSigner to GA
Deprecated
- Remove HonorPVReclaimPolicy feature gate
Version Updates
Subprojects and Dependency Updates
- CRI-O v1.33.9 continues patch-level support for the 1.33 release line with no listed functional changes or dependency updates.
- cluster-autoscaler v1.35.0 introduces major improvements including CapacityBuffer v1beta1 support, quota-aware capacity buffers, new GPU resource support, CSI volume limit-aware scaling, new scale-down performance metrics, and additional configuration flags for node startup time and scheduling parallelism. It also includes multiple bugfixes, updates Kubernetes libraries to v1.35.0, and refreshes cloudprovider integrations across AWS, Azure, GCE, Cluster API, Hetzner, and others.
- cluster-autoscaler patch releases (v1.32.6, v1.33.4, v1.34.3) deliver backported stability fixes across supported branches, including EC2 instance list refreshes, scale-down eligibility fixes, OCI node deletion improvements, and AWS/GPU-related updates.
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