Week Ending February 15, 2026

Developer News

Registration for Maintainer Summit EU 2026 is now open, and the full schedule is live. Register via: https://register.linuxfoundation.org/kccnc-eu-maintainer-summit-2026 . View the schedule at https://maintainersummiteu2026.sched.com and plan your day.

SIGs are asked to submit their annual reports by February 28, highlighting key accomplishments from the past year and identifying areas or subprojects that need additional support. Reports don’t have to be submitted by SIG/WG chairs, feel free to nominate candidates among your contributors.

KubeCon India CFP for Project Opportunities (Lightning Talks and Maintainer Track) is open, with submissions due by 1 March.

Open Source Summit India CFP closes on 4 March 2026. Submit your session here.

KubeCon Japan Regular CFP is open until 29 March 2026. Submit your proposal here.

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: Feature blog freeze, 27th February 2026

Feature blog blurbs for v1.36 are due next week. Wrap up your submissions and get ready — Code Freeze is next.

Patch Releases 1.35.1, 1.34.4, 1.33.8, 1.32.12 were published last week, delivering the latest fix and updates.

Featured PRs

• 136998: Migrate HPA MinReplicas to Declarative Validation with Feature Gate Support

This PR migrates validation of HorizontalPodAutoscalerSpec.MinReplicas to Kubernetes’ declarative validation framework with feature-gate awareness. It ensures validation dynamically respects the HPAScaleToZero feature gate, improving consistency, maintainability, and correctness of API validation as Kubernetes continues moving toward declarative validation.

• 136952: Add kubelet_metrics_provider metric

This PR introduces the kubelet_metrics_provider metric to help users identify which metrics provider kubelet uses to expose container statistics. The metric improves observability and debugging capabilities and supports monitoring requirements from the CRI stats KEP.

KEP of the Week

KEP-4762: Allows setting arbitrary FQDN as the pod’s hostname

This proposal introduces a new hostnameOverride field in the podSpec that allows users to set any Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) as a pod’s hostname. Once the API reaches GA, the Kubelet will always respect this field, bypassing the legacy behavior that derives hostnames from the hostname and subdomain fields and appends a cluster-specific suffix. By removing this restriction, pods can use exact FQDNs without automatic modification. The primary goal is to improve compatibility with traditional or legacy applications that rely on specific hostnames for authentication, authorization, or service logic. This change simplifies migration to Kubernetes by enabling strict DNS-based hostname matching required by some older systems.

This KEP graduated to beta in v1.35.

Other Merges

• Implement declarative modal validation +k8s:discriminator and +k8s:member
• k8s.io/cloud-provider: Adds missing TLS flags to webhook serving options.
• Fix data race in PopulateRefs by copying Items and AdditionalProperties.
• Fix kube-proxy’s nftables mode to work on systems with nft 1.1.3.
• Adds a formal stability lifecycle to DV rules so features can “graduate” and be enforced predictably.
• DRA: fix sharedID cache init when consumable capacity enabled.
• Pod Certificates (beta) now includes a PKCS#10 CSR to improve compatibility with existing CA implementations.
• Split node status write concurrency from node syncs with new –concurrent-node-status-updates flag.
• Action required: kubeadm drops integrated flex-volume support; migrate off flex-volumes before upgrading to v1.36.
• Fix scheduler/runtime duration metrics to record real latency instead of near-zero values.
• rbac: migrate PolicyRule.verbs to Declarative Validation.
• Client-go: Track informer store sync resourceVersion and expose LastStoreSyncResourceVersion() (AtomicFIFO-gated)
• Updates API server internal API group to improve openapi schema correctness for fields being optional or required

Promotions

• CustomCPUCFSquota to GA

Deprecated

• kubelet: defer the configurations flags deprecation removal timeline from 1.36 to 1.37
• ClusterTrustBundles v1beta1 to 1.37
• Disable gitRepo volume plugin by default with no re-enable path
• The deprecated SeparateCacheWatchRPC feature gate is now locked to its default value (false) and can no longer be overridden.

Version Updates

• release-1.35 go to 1.25.7
• release-1.34 go to 1.24.13
• release-1.33 go to 1.24.13
• go to 1.25.7
• ContainerRuntimeVersionCheckto 1.37
• opentelemetry-go to v1.40.0

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

• kubebuilder v4.12.0: upgrades core scaffolding dependencies (golangci-lint, cert-manager, controller-tools, kustomize), improves the Helm v2-alpha plugin output (Chart metadata, Notes.txt, dev Makefile targets), adds new project init options like --namespaced and --multigroup, and includes multiple CLI and e2e stability fixes.
• kustomize kustomize/v5.8.1: fixes the namespace propagation regression introduced in v5.8.0, restores Helm v4 compatibility, improves patch handling (including empty patch files), and refreshes dependencies such as json-patch and kyaml.
• etcd patch releases: v3.6.8 provides maintenance updates for the v3.6 line; also v3.5.27, v3.4.41.
• csi-driver-nfs v4.13.1: introduces mount path validation improvements, refreshes CSI release tooling, and includes minor maintenance updates for the v4.13 release branch.
• csi-driver-host-path v1.17.1: publishes a patch release for the hostpath CSI driver, updating the released container artifacts and changelog for the 1.17 line.
• vertical-pod-autoscaler v1.6.0: promotes InPlaceOrRecreate to GA, adds a new updater flag to skip disruption budget checks for safe in-place updates, improves memory usage by scoping informers, and includes multiple bugfixes for recommender and updater/admission-controller stability.

Shoutout

• Sreeram Venkitesh: Big shoutout to @aibarbetta for handling the v1.36.0-alpha.1 cut so gracefully despite the delays even after it being her first time doing a release cut! Congratulations! Special thanks to @xmudrii for all the help!
• xmudrii :A big shoutout to @mahamed and @bentheelder on behalf of Kubernetes Release Engineering! @mahamed migrated the Kubernetes release process to the community-owned infrastructure on a very short notice and made it significantly faster! This will save us a lot of time and give us better control over the release infrastructure enabling further improvements!@bentheelder has done significant work to simplify the Go update process in Kubernetes. This will enable us to deliver Go updates in Kubernetes much faster, which is especially important for Go updates that come with security fixes!

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