Kubernetes 1.26 ‘Electrifying’: Key New Features, Deprecations, and Upgrades

Announcement

Kubernetes 1.26 has been officially released, bringing 37 enhancements—11 promoted to stable, 10 to beta, and 16 in alpha—while deprecating or removing 12 features.

Version Theme and Logo

The theme for v1.26 is “Electrifying”. The release emphasizes the importance of Kubernetes building blocks and raises awareness of carbon footprint and environmental sustainability.

Core Themes

Key areas include changes to the container image registry, removal of CRI v1alpha2, storage improvements, signing of release artifacts, Windows high‑privilege containers, metric enhancements, dynamic resource allocation, CEL‑based admission control, and pod scheduling improvements.

Container Image Registry

The new default registry is registry.k8s.io; the old k8s.gcr.io no longer provides images for v1.26.

CRI v1alpha2 Removal

Support for CRI v1alpha2 is dropped, requiring container runtimes such as containerd 1.6.0 or newer.

Storage Improvements

vSphere and Azure File CSI drivers graduated to stable.

FSGroup delegation to CSI drivers is now stable.

In‑tree GlusterFS and OpenStack Cinder drivers have been removed.

Release Artifact Signing

All release binaries and images are now signed with cosign and can be verified.

Windows High‑Privilege Containers

HostProcess containers are now stable, allowing containers to run with host‑level privileges.

Metric Enhancements

Metric framework extensions upgraded to alpha with internal and beta maturity levels.

Component health Service Level Indicators upgraded to alpha.

Feature metrics are now enabled.

Dynamic Resource Allocation

Provides a CDI‑based mechanism for allocating resources such as GPUs.

CEL Admission Control

Introduces a v1alpha1 API for validating admission policies using the Common Expression Language.

Pod Scheduling Improvements

PodSchedulingReadiness graduated to alpha, adding .spec.schedulingGates.

NodeInclusionPolicyInPodTopologySpread upgraded to beta.

Other Updates

Eleven features were promoted to stable, including Windows high‑privilege containers, vSphere‑to‑CSI migration, FSGroup delegation, Azure File CSI, removal of lingering Pods, in‑cluster traffic policies, Kubelet credential providers, mixed‑protocol LoadBalancer services, reserved service IP ranges, CPUManager, and DeviceManager.

Deprecations and Removals

Twelve APIs and components were deprecated or removed, such as CRI v1alpha2, v1beta1 flow‑control API group, v2beta2 HorizontalPodAutoscaler, GlusterFS, legacy logging flags, kube‑proxy userspace mode, in‑tree credential management, OpenStack cloud provider, dynamic kubelet config, non‑conformant kubectl flags, and several kube‑apiserver/kubectl command‑line parameters.

Release Notes and Availability

Full release notes are available at the Kubernetes GitHub changelog. v1.26 can be downloaded from the official Kubernetes site, with tutorials and local cluster options like Kind or kubeadm.