The new Kubernetes 1.22 release includes 53 enhancements – 13 of which graduated to stable and 24 of which are moving to beta.
In April of this year, the Kubernetes release cadence was officially changed from four to three releases yearly. This is the first longer-cycle release related to that change.
One major feature that graduated to GA, server-side Apply, is a new field ownership and object merge algorithm running on the Kubernetes API server, allowing users to create and/or modify their objects declaratively.
Support for Kubernetes client credential plugins is now stable and it offers improved support for plugins that provide interactive login flows, as well as a number of bug fixes.
etcd moves to 3.5.0 and it comes with improvements to the security, performance, monitoring, and developer experience. There are numerous bug fixes and some critical new features like the migration to structured logging and built-in log rotation.
As an alpha feature, Kubernetes v1.22 can now use the cgroups v2 API to control memory allocation and isolation to improve workload and node availability when there is contention for memory resources, and to improve the predictability of container lifecycle.
Additional enhancements include node system swap support, Windows enhancements and capabilities, default profiles for seccomp, and more secure control plane with kubeadm.
Major changes include the removal of several deprecated beta APIs and API changes and improvements for ephemeral containers.
Additional details are available here.
