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Several months after the upstream release, Kubernetes has shown up on AKS. The release means that version 1.17, which went to GA in AKS in July last year after its upstream release in December 2019, is officially dead.

The support for each version by the Kubernetes community was recently moved from 9 months to a whole year. As far as Microsoft is concerned though, AKS only supports the newest GA minor version and the two previous latest minor versions.

The company advised users, telling them they “should upgrade” as soon as they can, to “ensure your cluster is fully patched and supported.”

“The Raddest Release”

This situation is fine for those who are happy to have the latest of everything but less so for enterprises that would like to believe in containers but are used to the longer support periods Microsoft used to offer.

It is a heavy release as well, as the release team called it “The Raddest Release” and one of the most “feature dense” releases in a while.

It may be feature-dense but the team still deprecated Dockershim, warning that support for it will be eventually removed in future releases.

What’s new?

Now, users can enjoy a stable version of volume snapshot operations and Process ID limiting. There is also the alpha of graceful node shutdown, to “prevent issues for some workloads,” as the team puts it.

The update comes days after the Kubernetes team made RC0 of v1.21 of the technology generally available.

The update will be applied by Microsoft in June (if the April upstream release goes as planned). It will also be the signal needed for version 1.18 to reach the end of its life.