🚨 Kubernetes v1.36 is officially dropping on April 22, 2026.
Here are the 6 major updates you need to prepare your clusters for: 👇
1⃣ HPA Scale-to-Zero (Enabled by Default):
→ HPAScaleToZero graduates after sitting in alpha since v1.16.
→ You can now reliably set minReplicas: 0.
→ Massive cost-saver for idle staging environments and batch processing pipelines.
2⃣ Ephemeral SA Tokens for Image Pulls:
→ Replaces long-lived static secrets for private registry authentication.
→ Uses short-lived, auto-rotating Service Account tokens instead.
→ Credentials are now scoped directly to the pod's identity, vastly reducing leak risks.
3⃣ Smarter HPA Pod Selection:
→ Fixes the issue where HPA calculates metrics from orphaned or stale pods.
→ New logic ensures HPA only reads metrics from pods explicitly managed by the target workload.
→ Autoscaling behavior becomes significantly more predictable and reliable.
4⃣ kube-proxy IPVS Mode Removal:
→ IPVS mode was deprecated in v1.35 and is slated for complete removal.
→ Time to migrate your clusters to iptables (nftables backend) or eBPF-based proxying (like Cilium).
→ Plan your migration now before a patch upgrade breaks your networking stack.
5⃣ Ingress NGINX Retirement & Gateway API:
→ The upstream community is actively shifting away from Ingress NGINX.
→ Gateway API is establishing itself as the new standard for traffic management.
→ Brings native cross-namespace routing without relying on a patchwork of custom annotations.
6⃣ Containerd 2.x Alignment:
→ v1.36 will likely be the final release to support older versions of containerd (like 1.6.x).
→ The Kubernetes project is fully aligning its ecosystem with containerd 2.x.
→ Upgrade your container runtimes now to avoid breaking changes in the next cycle.