Kubernetes 1.22 is released. The latest release includes 53 enhancements: 13 enhancements have graduated to stable, 24 enhancements are moving to beta, 16 enhancements are entering alpha, and 3 features have been deprecated.
Server-side apply
This year, the Kubernetes team decided to change its release cadence from four to three releases per year and the 1.22 release is the first longer-cycle release related to the change.
With the Kubernetes 1.22, server-side apply is now generally available after its beta period for a couple of releases. It is a new field ownership and object merge algorithm running on the Kubernetes API server. It aims to allow users and controllers to manage the resources via declarative configurations. It also allows users to create and modify the objects declaratively, simply by sending their fully specified intent.
Other major changes in the release are, support Kubernetes client credential plugins is now stable, after being in beta since 1.11. Kubernetes’ default backend storage, etcd’s new version, 3.5.0 is released, which comes with improvements to the security, performance, monitoring, and developer experience. Kubernetes v1.22 can use the cgroups v2 API to control memory allocation and isolation.
Kubernetes 1.22 also introduces alpha support to run nodes with swap memory. CSI support for Windows nodes is also generally available with the 1.22 release. An alpha feature for default seccomp profiles has been added to the kubelet, along with a new command line flag and configuration. Another new alpha feature allows running the kubeadm control plane components as non-root users.