The first Kubernetes release of 2023, Kubernetes v1.27 has been announced and it consists of 60 new enhancements, 18 of which are entering alpha and 13 of which are graduating to Stable.

With this release, the image registry, k8sgcr.io, has been replaced with registry.k8s.io, which is fully controlled by the community. The old registry will now be frozen and no images for Kubernetes and related sub-projects will be published on k8s.gcr.io.

SeccompDefault has also graduated to Stable, meaning that in order to use profile defaulting, the user needs to run the kubelet with the –seccomp-default command line flag enabled for each node where it is used. 

Next, mutable scheduling directives for Jobs has graduated to GA. This was first introduced in v1.22 and started in beta, but is now stable. 

This capability allows for a Job’s scheduling directives to be updated prior to it starting, allowing for custom cue controllers to influence pod placement while also offloading actual pod-to-node assignment to kube-scheduler. 

Pod Scheduling Readiness is also moving to beta with this release. By specifying a Pod’s .spec.schedulingGates, the user can control when a Pod is ready to be considered for scheduling. 

Furthermore, cluster administrators can now query service logs so that they can debug issues with services running on node. The NodeLogQuery feature gate must be enabled on node in order to use this feature. 

The way SELinux labels are applied to volumes used by Pods is also graduating to beta, accelerating container startup by mounting volumes with the right SELinux label rather than changing each file on the volumes recursively.

For a full list of updates, visit the website.