Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, acknowledges that Kubernetes continues to see rapid innovation. Today, as the orchestration platform has matured, the focus is shifting toward making Long-Term Support (LTS) truly long-lasting.
Many Kubernetes users are already familiar with LTS variants, such as Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which extends security support for an extra year beyond the standard 14-month cycle. But Kubernetes has always been built for fast movers—after all, new versions are released every four months.
‘Deploy-and-move-forward’
Canonical is introducing Kubernetes 1.32 as its first LTS release. CEO Mark Shuttleworth describes the frequent updates required by Kubernetes as “a drain on enterprise teams” and wants to provide an alternative that emphasizes long-term stability. To support this, Canonical offers enterprise-grade Kubernetes across multiple environments, including bare metal, public clouds, OpenStack, Canonical’s own MicroCloud, and VMware.
Shuttleworth advocates for a “deploy-and-move-forward” approach to containers, where organizations focus on evolving their applications rather than managing the underlying infrastructure. In other words, businesses should concentrate on their own innovation instead of worrying about the platform their workloads are orchestrated on.
A sign of maturity
Kubernetes has clearly reached a level of maturity. In around a decade, it has become a critical component of the cloud-native ecosystem, enabling workloads that are easily migrated and replicated.
Now, Kubernetes can be seen as foundational infrastructure—similar to an operating system like Ubuntu. It’s no surprise, then, that Canonical plans to release new Kubernetes LTS versions every two years, with interim updates arriving every four months. Each interim release will receive 14 months of support, mirroring the options available in Microsoft AKS.
Although Canonical’s LTS version is its own distribution of Kubernetes, it remains highly standardized. The company promises to use best-in-class open-source components while maintaining compatibility with standard Kubernetes abstractions and APIs. This ensures long-term interoperability.
For those interested, Canonical Kubernetes LTS 1.32 is available now.
Also read: Canonical calls to move away from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS now