Release of Kubernetes 1.24 with Network Policy Status, Contextual Logging, and Subresource Support

Published on Nov 11, 2022

In May, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) released Kubernetes 1.24 under the name Stargazer. As part of this release, new features include Network Policy Status, Contextual Logging, and signing release artifacts, which are 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. Dockershim has been removed from version 1.24.

A new subresource flag has been added to kubectl, the command-line tool for running commands against clusters. Instead of using curl commands, the new subcommand makes it easier to update subresources.

Logging context is introduced to improve the usability of log output. Libraries are passed a logger instance by their caller and use that for logging rather than accessing a global logger.

Using cosign, one of signstore’s tools for signing, verifying, and protecting software, container images pertaining to release artifacts can now be signed and verified.

A status subresource has been added to network policies in version 1.24 to facilitate the troubleshooting of network-related issues since network policies are implemented differently by each CNI.

OpenAPI v3 support has been moved to beta in version 1.24 and is enabled by default. This feature enables the kube-apiserver, the server that validates and configures the data for API objects such as pods, services, etc., to serve objects in OpenAPI v3 format.

Additionally, mixed protocols are enabled by default in beta services of the type LoadBalancer. A service of type LoadBalancer can serve different protocols on the same port (e.g. TCP and UDP).

Graceful node shutdown was introduced in version 1.21, and it is now available 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.

With this release, CSI volume expansion has become generally available and is enabled by default. Whenever the underlying CSI driver supports volume expansion, this feature can dynamically resize persistent volumes.

Additionally, PodOverhead has been made stable in this release and is enabled by default. When scheduling a pod, Kubernetes takes into account the pod infrastructure in addition to the container requests and limitations. This feature requires a Runtime class that defines the overhead field.

The Kubernetes scheduler can now check the capacity of a node’s associated storage before placing a pod since storage capacity tracking was moved to stable in version 1.24. By doing so, multiple scheduling attempts are minimized by excluding nodes with insufficient storage.

The Kubernetes system is a production-grade orchestration system for deploying, scaling, and managing application containers.

Kubernetes version 1.24 contains 46 enhancements, including 13 new features, 13 becoming generally available or stable, and 15 moving into beta. Six features have also been deprecated.