What’s New in Kubernetes 1.24? A Deep Dive into Major Features and Changes

Release Announcement

Today we are pleased to announce that Kubernetes 1.24, the first release of 2022, is now officially available.

The release contains 46 enhancements: 14 have been promoted to stable, 15 entered beta, 13 entered alpha, while 2 features were deprecated and 2 were removed.

Key Highlights

Removal of dockershim from kubelet – After being deprecated in 1.20, dockershim is removed in 1.24. Users must switch to supported runtimes such as containerd or CRI‑O, or use cri‑dockerd if they wish to keep Docker Engine.

Beta APIs disabled by default – New beta APIs are off by default, but existing beta APIs and their newer versions remain enabled.

Signed release artifacts – Release artifacts are now signed with cosign, providing experimental image signature verification.

OpenAPI v3 support – Kubernetes 1.24 adds beta support for the OpenAPI v3 format.

Storage capacity tracking and CSI volume expansion – CSIStorageCapacity objects expose available storage capacity, improving pod scheduling, and persistent volumes can now be resized.

NonPreemptingPriority reaches stable – A new option for PriorityClasses allows enabling or disabling pod preemption.

In‑tree storage plugin migration – Migration of in‑tree storage plugins to CSI drivers is underway (e.g., Azure Disk, OpenStack Cinder).

gRPC probe upgraded to beta – gRPC probes are now beta‑enabled by default, allowing native configuration of startup, liveness, and readiness checks for gRPC applications.

Kubelet certificate provider upgraded to beta – The kubelet image credential provider, originally alpha in 1.20, is now beta and retrieves registry credentials via an exec plugin.

Contextual logging enters alpha – Introduces fine‑grained control over log format, verbosity, and additional fields.

Service IP allocation conflict avoidance – A new feature lets users reserve a soft range for static service IPs, reducing the risk of IP conflicts. Services can obtain IPs dynamically or be assigned statically.

Dynamic kubelet configuration removed – Deprecated in 1.22, this feature is fully removed in 1.24 and will be eliminated from the API server in 1.26.

CNI Version Considerations

Before upgrading to 1.24, ensure your container runtime is compatible. Supported runtimes include containerd v1.6.4+ (or v1.5.11+), and CRI‑O v1.24+. Versions containerd v1.6.0‑v1.6.3 may cause CNI network setup/teardown failures unless the CNI plugin is upgraded.

Other Updates

Fourteen enhancements reach stable, such as CSI volume expansion, Pod Overhead accounting, non‑preempting priority, storage capacity tracking, OpenStack Cinder and Azure Disk migrations to CSI, efficient watch recovery, load‑balancer class annotation, indexed jobs, job pause field, pod affinity namespaceSelector, controller‑manager leader migration, and CSR duration.

Two important changes: removal of dockershim and default disabling of beta APIs.

Release Notes and Resources

For full details, see the official release notes and changelog. The release is available on GitHub, and you can get started with interactive tutorials, Kind, or kubeadm.

The release theme is “Stargazer”, symbolizing the community’s shared vision of exploring the future.