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Industry watchers are concerned over the extent of feature deprecation in the new release.

This week the technical oversight committee (TOC) for Kubernetes announced the general availability of their 1.22 update. This latest release is notable not just for what is new, but also for what is now no longer available.

The latest update deprecates a large number of Kubernetes application programming interfaces (APIs). It is most probable however that many IT teams which have already deployed Kubernetes clusters may be relying on these now deprecated APIs.

The Kubernetes Release Team announced in a blog post entitled Kubernetes 1.22: Reaching New Peaks. “This release consists of 53 enhancements,” they wrote. “13 enhancements have graduated to stable, 24 enhancements are moving to beta, and 16 enhancements are entering alpha. Also, three features have been deprecated.”

The APIs that went away include the beta versions of the CustomResourceDefinition API, the APIService API and the TokenReview API. These APIs are giving way to more stable APIs that are now generally available with version 1.22 of Kubernetes.

Deprecation is natural and due to the maturing of the Kubernetes project

In their release announcement, the Kubernetes Release Team explained. “As the Kubernetes project matures, the number of enhancements per cycle grows. This means more work, from version to version, for the contributor community and Release Engineering team, and it can put pressure on the end-user community to stay up-to-date with releases containing increasingly more features.”

Krishna Kilari (Amazon Web Services) and Tim Bannister (The Scale Factory) commented on the API deprecation. “As the Kubernetes API evolves, APIs are periodically reorganized or upgraded. When APIs evolve, the old APIs they replace are deprecated, and eventually removed,” they wrote.

“We want to make sure you’re aware of some upcoming removals. These are beta APIs that you can use in current, supported Kubernetes versions, and they are already deprecated. The reason for all of these removals is that they have been superseded by a newer, stable (“GA”) API.”