The Kubernetes project has released version 1.19 of the platform, the second release for 2020, and by far the longest release cycle lasting 20 weeks in total.

The 1.19 release consists of 34 enhancements: 10 enhancements are moving to stable, 15 enhancements in beta, and 9 enhancements in alpha.

Major updates include the extended support window for Kubernetes versions from nine months to one year. “A survey conducted in early 2019 by the Long Term Support (LTS) working group showed that a significant subset of Kubernetes end-users fail to upgrade within the current 9-month support period,” said a blog post by Kubernetes 1.19 Release Team.

“This, and other responses from the survey, suggest that 30% of users would be able to keep their deployments on supported versions if the patch support period were extended to 12-14 months,” it added.

The extension is likely to allow for the support the cushion end-users appear to desire, and is more in accordance with familiar annual planning cycles.

Moreover, the new generic ephemeral volumes alpha feature allows any existing storage driver that supports dynamic provisioning to be used as an ephemeral volume with the volume’s lifecycle bound to the Pod.

It can be used to provide scratch storage that is different from the root disk, for example persistent memory, or a separate local disk on that node.

Kubernetes 1.19 also features the alpha version of CSI health monitoring. This feature enables CSI Drivers to share abnormal volume conditions from the underlying storage systems with Kubernetes so that they can be reported as events on PVCs or Pods.