The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) released Kubernetes 1.24 in May by the name Stargazer. The release has new features such as Network Policy Status, Contextual Logging, and signing release artifacts, generally available for stable features such as PodOverhead, CSI volume expansion, and CSR duration, beta features such as OpenAPI v3, gRPC probes, volume populator, and deprecated features such as DynamicKubeletConfig. In version 1.24, dockershim is removed.
In the new release, kubectl, the command-line tool to run commands against clusters, includes a new subresource flag to fetch and update subresources. The new subcommand makes it easier to update subresources instead of using curl commands.
Contextual logging is introduced to make log output more useful so that libraries are passed a logger instance by their caller and use that for logging instead of accessing a global logger.
To increase supply chain security, container images pertaining release artifacts can now be signed and verified using cosign, one of signstore’s tools to sign, verify, and protect software.
In version 1.24, a status subresource has been added to network policies to make it easier to troubleshoot network-related issues since network policies are implemented differently by the different CNIs.
OpenAPI v3 support moved to beta in version 1.24 and it’s turned on by default. Such a feature allows the kube-apiserver, the server that validates and configures data for the API objects which include pods, services,...etc, to serve objects in OpenAPI v3 format.
In addition, mixed protocols in services with the type LoadBalancer are turned on by default in beta. This allows a service of type LoadBalancer to serve different protocols (i.e: TCP and UDP) on the same port.
Graceful node shutdown was first introduced in version 1.21 and now it’s in beta. Such a feature allows distinction between the termination of regular pods and critical pods running on the node and provides pods with extra time to stop.
CSI volume expansion became generally available in this release and enabled by default. This feature can dynamically resize persistent volumes whenever the underlying CSI driver supports volume expansion.
Also, PodOverhead became stable in this release and enabled by default. This allows Kubernetes when scheduling a pod to account for the pod infrastructure on top of the container requests and limits. A Runtime class that defines the overhead field is required to utilize such a feature.
Storage capacity tracking moved to stable in version 1.24 allowing the Kubernetes scheduler to make sure there’s enough capacity on a node’s associated storage before placing a pod. That way, it minimizes multiple scheduling attempts by filtering out nodes that do not have enough storage.
Kubernetes is an open-source production-grade orchestration system for deploying, scaling, and managing application containers.
According to the release notes, Kubernetes version 1.24 has 46 enhancements including 13 new, 13 becoming generally available or stable, and 15 moving to beta. In addition, six features have been deprecated.
CNCF held a webinar on May 24, 2022, to review the major features and answer questions.