Week Ending November 01, 2026

Developer News

SIG ContribEx has published its 2025 annual report, summarizing the year’s community-infrastructure work, Slack and GitHub administration, mentoring programs, and contributor-experience investments.
WG Device Management has published its 2025 annual report covering the working group’s progress on device plugin architecture and DRA-related work.
SIG API Machinery has added apiextensions-api to its server-crd subproject, bringing CRD API types into scope for the subproject’s maintainers.
The Maintainer Summit at KubeCon NA 2026 is nearly full; maintainers who plan to attend in Salt Lake City should register before capacity is reached.

Release Schedule

Next Deadline: Feature Blog Freeze, November 4 (AoE)

Contributors planning v1.38 feature blogs should open placeholder PRs by November 4. Code and test freeze begin November 16 (AoE); prepare implementation and test PRs for review ahead of the freeze.

Kubernetes v1.38.0-alpha.3 is available.

Patch releases 1.37.2, 1.36.6, 1.35.10, and 1.34.13 are available. Versions 1.37.2 and 1.36.6 use Go 1.26.10.

Kubernetes 1.34 reaches end of life on October 27; move to a supported version.

Featured PRs

143644: Update volume health APIs as per newest version of KEP

gnufied updated Kubernetes volume health APIs to align with the latest design in KEP-1432, with related changes discussed in KEP-6395. The change moves volumeHealth from PodStatus into PodStatus.VolumeStatus and introduces Healthy and Unknown values for volume health conditions in the core API and CSINode types. It also clarifies how readers and writers should handle new condition values, helping maintain compatibility as volume health reporting evolves. These API changes establish a clearer contract for reporting storage health across Kubernetes and CSI drivers.

143701: KEP-5502: Run EmptyDirVolumeMode e2e tests in alpha/beta kind jobs

blackjid fixed the test selection for EmptyDirVolumeMode end-to-end tests so they can run in the alpha/beta Kind jobs. The tests were being excluded because the additional [Feature:EmptyDirVolumeMode] label conflicted with the jobs’ OffByDefault feature filter, and no other job selected them. This change removes the redundant label while retaining framework.WithFeatureGate(...), allowing the tests to run in CI and build a test history ahead of the feature’s beta promotion. The work supports KEP-5502.

KEP of the Week

KEP-6011: CSI ControllerGetNodeInfo

CSI drivers sometimes query cloud APIs during NodeGetInfo to report a node’s topology and volume attachment limit, requiring cloud credentials on worker nodes. KEP-6011 lets an opting-in driver return only the node ID there; a new ControllerGetNodeInfo call can retrieve topology, attachment limits, and attached volume IDs from the controller. The external-attacher can then account for non-CSI disks when publishing the node’s volume limit. Existing drivers retain the current NodeGetInfo flow.

胡玮文 and Eddie Torres authored the KEP for SIG Storage with SIG Node. The idea began with a CSI spec proposal in March, and the KEP merged October 1. The CSI spec proposal and the Kubernetes feature-gate and API PR remain open. KEP-6011 is implementable and targets Alpha in v1.38, Beta in v1.39, and Stable in v1.41; the enhancement issue tracks the work.

Other Merges

cel-go upgraded to v0.33.0, now imported as cel.dev/cel-go; Go code passing cel-go types to k8s.io/apiserver, apiextensions-apiserver or dynamic-resource-allocation must update imports
CRD types and clients move to the new k8s.io/apiextensions-api module, with deprecated aliases left in apiextensions-apiserver
kube-apiserver adds conditional authorization support
client-go leader election adds write-gating and leader recovery
The locked GA SupplementalGroupsPolicy feature gate is removed; remove it from component configuration before upgrading
StatefulSet maxUnavailable no longer counts unavailable pods below the partition against the update budget
Decoding JSON lists into UnstructuredList uses about half the memory and a third less time
New WatchFromStorageWithoutPrevKV feature gate enables etcd watches without prev-kv
kubelet adds kubelet_sync_result_errors_total and kubelet_pod_worker_errors_total metrics for pod sync errors
DRA capacity requests now reject negative quantities, invalid names, and more than 32 entries

Subprojects and Dependency Updates

nerdctl v2.4.2: Updated containerd to v2.4.2, fixed image prune removing every unused image, added --device-cgroup-rule
grpc v1.85.1: Fixed Health Watch RPC DoS, fixed AsyncIO client-streaming memory leak, host/:authority handling in HPACK parser; also v1.84.2

Shoutouts

No shoutouts this week. Want to thank someone for special efforts to improve Kubernetes? Tag them in the #shoutouts channel.

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