CNCF and Releases

CNCF and Releases

The CNCF, Release Cadence and Support Windows

The day 1.0 shipped, Google donated Kubernetes 5,150 to the new Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) under the Linux Foundation, so no single vendor owns it. It was the first CNCF project to graduate, on 6 March 2018.

A minor release ships about every four months (three a year since 1.22 in 2021). The project maintains the three newest minors, each for about 14 months: 12 months of standard support, then two months of maintenance mode with fixes only for CVEs, dependencies and critical bugs. Each branch publishes its newest patch as a text file:

Current Kubernetes releases and this cluster's versionsYAML

for v in "" -1.37 -1.36 -1.35 -1.34; do
  printf 'stable%-6s %s\n' "$v" "$(curl -sL https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable$v.txt)"
done
kubectl version

Output

stable       v1.37.1
stable-1.37  v1.37.1
stable-1.36  v1.36.5
stable-1.35  v1.35.9
stable-1.34  v1.34.12
Client Version: v1.37.1
Kustomize Version: v5.8.1
Server Version: v1.37.0

Kubernetes 1.37 "Garhwal" (26 August 2026) is supported until 28 October 2027; 1.34 reaches end of life on 27 October 2026. kubectl 5,150 is supported within one minor version of the API server. Plan at least one upgrade a year, read each release's "Urgent Upgrade Notes", and never skip a minor on the control plane.

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