Week Ending February 22, 2026

Developer News

CFP submissions for Open Source Summit India are due March 4. Submit here.

The CFP for Project Opportunities (Lightning Talks and Maintainer Track) at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India closes on March 1. Submit your proposals here.

The Kubernetes Working Group Serving has been disbanded after completing its objective of advancing AI inference workloads in Kubernetes. Ongoing efforts can transition to existing SIGs and working groups, including SIG Node, SIG Scheduling, SIG Apps, SIG Network, SIG Scalability, and WG Device Management. Congratulations to the WG members on successfully achieving their goals.

ingress-nginx will reach End of Life (EOL) on March 31, concluding its best-effort maintenance period.

Release Schedule

Next Deadline:Feature blog freeze, 27th February 2026 Code & Test Freeze, 19th March 2026

Feature blog blurbs for v1.36 are due on 27th February 2026. Make sure you’ve opted in and coordinated with Release Comms if your enhancement wants to be featured.

Code & Test Freeze follows 19th March 2026 — enhancements must be merge-ready with approvals, and only release-blocking fixes land after that.

Cherry picks for the March patch release close 6th March 2026, with the release targeted for 10th March 2026.

Featured PRs

• 137200: Add WorkloadAwarePreemption feature gate

This PR introduces the WorkloadAwarePreemption feature gate as part of KEP-5710. The feature gate lays the groundwork for smarter scheduling decisions that consider workload characteristics during pod preemption, improving fairness and efficiency in cluster resource allocation.

• 137128: Add TopologyAwareWorkloadScheduling feature gate

This PR adds the TopologyAwareWorkloadScheduling feature gate for KEP-5732, enabling upcoming scheduler improvements that take topology constraints into account. This helps prepare Kubernetes for more intelligent workload placement based on node and cluster topology awareness.

KEP of the Week

KEP-4317: Pod Certificates

The certificates.k8s.io API group enables requesting X.509 certificates within a Kubernetes cluster but does not directly handle delivering them to workloads. This KEP introduces a PodCertificateRequest API, similar to CertificateSigningRequest, specifically for pods requesting certificates from a designated signer. It also defines a PodCertificate projected volume that allows the kubelet to provision private keys and certificate chains for pods. Together, these components enable secure and automated certificate distribution to pods with minimal burden on developers and administrators. The mechanism is designed for both built-in Kubernetes signers and third-party systems issuing X.509 certificates to cluster workloads.

This KEP graduated to beta in v1.35.

Other Merges

• DaemonSet controller defers sync on stale cache to prevent duplicate pod creation; adds daemonset_controller_stale_sync_skips_total metric (override via StaleControllerConsistencyDaemonSet=false).
• Return PreBind-preempted Pods to the backoff queue instead of deleting them from the apiserver.
• Networkpolicy: migrate ipBlock.cidr validation to DV
• Fix kubectl plugin list to detect overshadowed plugins correctly on Windows.
• Add PodGroup scheduling cycle so kube-scheduler can place an entire PodGroup in a single cycle.
• Fix kubectl logs -f to wait for containers to start instead of failing during ContainerCreating/PodInitializing.
• Updated feature gate MutablePodResourcesForSuspendedJobs and MutableSchedulingDirectivesForSuspendedJobs to be enabled by default.
• Extended PostFilterResult with a list of Pods that the PostFilter plugin preempted.
• Fix incorrect APIVersion in PodCertificateRequest OwnerReference
• Add kubectl diff –show-secret to explicitly allow displaying Secret values during diffs.
• Add an alpha informer_processing_latency_seconds histogram metric to measure event handler execution time in RealFIFO.
• Drop ProtoMessage() markers from k8s.io/api REST types; use apimachinery protobuf serializer instead (KEP-5589).
• apiserver_rerouted_request_total metric will expose labels for group, version and resource.

Promotions

• MutatingAdmissionPolicy to GA
• Component-base metrics to beta

Version Updates

• Bump images and versions to go 1.24.13 and distroless iptables
• kubectl in kustomize to v5.8.1
• etcd images to v3.6.8
• golangci-lint to 2.9.

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

• minikube v1.38.1: adds Kubernetes v1.35.1 support, fixes lock file and cross-architecture regressions, improves Windows registry connectivity checks, and refreshes multiple addon and CNI component images (ingress-nginx, metrics-server, Cilium, flannel, kindnetd, Volcano, kube-vip).
• cluster-autoscaler-chart v9.55.1: publishes a Helm chart update for Cluster Autoscaler, aligning packaging with the latest supported chart release stream.
• gRPC v1.78.1: fixes Python fork-support defaults to prevent multithreaded hangs, removes unintended startup warnings, modernizes Python API docs, and adds Ruby 4.0 build/test support.
• Prometheus v3.10.0-rc.1: introduces a new distroless Docker image variant, adds PromQL fill() modifiers and OpenAPI 3.2 spec support, improves service discovery modularity via build tags, enhances performance in PromQL/TSDB/OTLP paths, and delivers multiple PromQL, TSDB, and UI bug fixes.

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