Wednesday's release of Kubernetes v1.37 shows how the team behind the popular open source resource orchestrator is prioritizing production readiness, pruning outdated features even while it adds new ones.Overall, the release, nicknamed Garhwal after India’s lush Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, includes 67 changes: 16 features that have graduated to stable, production-ready status, along with 23 features being tested as beta, 27 new alpha features, and 1 deprecation.The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which stewards (but does not manage) Kubernetes among more than 220 cloud native projects, has to be mindful of its user base, which may be growing out of its infatuation with the bleeding edge.
Approximately 82 percent of container users run Kubernetes in production, up from 66 percent in 2023, according to a CNCF January survey. Kubernetes has also become a big driver of AI workloads, with CNCF reporting that 66 percent of organizations hosting generative AI models use Kubernetes to manage some or all of their inference workloads.
Metrics ratifiedOne of the first rules of maintaining production software is to keep the betas moving along. This release finally bumps the Metrics API to general availability, after being in beta status for the last nine years of K8s’ 12 years of public existence.In 2020, the maintainers of the Kubernetes resource orchestration platform set down the law: Any new API-based feature must not linger in beta status for more than three Kubernetes minor releases (about 12 months in the current release cadence). After three releases, the beta must move to general availability, or be replaced by another attempt at offering the same functionality. The thinking was that forcing a technology off beta status would inspire the maintainers to finish the work. If beta APIs stick around too long, temporary designations (“v1beta1”) might become embedded in automated systems and require changes later. Their temporary status will also trip up security software, which frowns on the production use of “pre-production” software.The CNCF declined to comment on why this particular API beta got lodged in the slipstream of new releases. A CNCF spokesperson noted that the organization does not interfere in the decisions of the projects under its purview."Despite the Beta label, the metrics.k8s.io API has been widely used in production for years," commented Kubernetes 1.37 Release Lead Dipesh Rawat in a statement to The Register.Like the millionaires who found a loophole in New York City’s pied-à-terre tax, the Metrics API skirted out of these mandates perhaps due to a technicality, in that it isn’t managed by the API server itself, but rather is an aggregated API served out-of-tree by a separate metrics server. Also, the Instrumentation Special Interest Group was busy refining the underlying performance of the metrics serving engine after replacing the previous version, Heapster.The API provides CPU and memory usage for pods and nodes. These numbers can be used not only for compiling reports but also as input for other features, such as pod autoscaling. It’s stable, everybody uses it, and now it’s official.
