Kubernetes 1.22 Release Announcement: New Features, Enhancements, and Deprecations
The Kubernetes 1.22 release introduces 53 enhancements—including GA Server‑Side Apply, stable external credential providers, etcd 3.5.0, memory QoS, Windows support, seccomp defaults, and numerous API deprecations—while shifting the release cadence to three major versions per year to balance development workload and user adoption.
Today the Kubernetes community announces the availability of version 1.22, the second release of 2021, which brings a total of 53 enhancements. Thirteen of these features have graduated to stable, twenty‑four entered beta, sixteen are in alpha, and three have been removed.
The release cadence has been adjusted from four to three major releases per year, making 1.22 the first long‑cycle release under the new schedule. This change aims to balance contributor workload with a smoother upgrade experience for users.
Key highlights include:
Server‑Side Apply reaches GA, providing a declarative field‑ownership and object‑merge algorithm for the API server.
External Credential Provider becomes stable, offering better support for interactive login plugins.
etcd 3.5.0 updates the default data store with security, performance, and monitoring improvements.
Memory QoS introduces cgroups v2 support in alpha to improve workload availability under memory contention.
Node System Swap Support adds an alpha feature allowing nodes to use swap space.
Windows Enhancements bring GA CSI support, Windows privileged containers, and broader CNI compatibility.
seccomp Default Configuration becomes an alpha feature, enabling cluster‑wide default profiles for improved security.
kubeadm Rootless Control Plane allows control‑plane components to run as non‑root users.
Additional changes remove several deprecated beta APIs (Ingress, IngressClass, Lease, etc.) and introduce new alpha features such as PodSecurity replacement, Memory Manager beta, API Server tracing, and v1beta3 kubeadm configuration.
For a complete list of changes, see the official release notes and linked documentation.
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