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Kubernetes Tutorial · Kubernetes Basics · Lesson 6 of 26

Kubernetes History & Versions

Where Kubernetes came from, how it became the standard container orchestrator, its release cadence and support windows, and which versions are current.

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How Kubernetes started

Google had run its services in containers for years on internal cluster managers, Borg and later Omega. In June 2014 a group of Google engineers (Joe Beda, Brendan Burns and Craig McLuckie, soon joined by others) announced Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestrator built on those lessons. The name is Greek for "helmsman"; K8s abbreviates the eight letters between K and s.

Kubernetes 1.0 shipped in July 2015, and Google donated it to the newly founded Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the Linux Foundation. Competing orchestrators (Docker Swarm, Mesos with Marathon) remained, but by 2018 every major cloud offered managed Kubernetes and it became the default.

Timeline

  1. Kubernetes 1.37Current
    • The current minor release; supported until 2027-10
  2. Kubernetes 1.36Supported
  3. Kubernetes 1.35Supported
  4. Kubernetes 1.34End of life · Oct 2026
  5. Kubernetes dockershim removed (1.24)Historic
    • Kubernetes talks to container runtimes such as containerd and CRI-O directly through the CRI
  6. Kubernetes Gateway API v1.0Historic
    • The successor to Ingress for HTTP routing reaches general availability
  7. Kubernetes CNCF graduationHistoric
    • Kubernetes is the first project to graduate from the CNCF
  8. Kubernetes 1.0 and the CNCFHistoric
    • The first stable release, donated to the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation
  9. Kubernetes announcedHistoric
    • Open-sourced by Google, building on its internal Borg and Omega systems

Releases and support

Kubernetes ships three minor releases a year (since 1.22). Each is supported with patch releases for about 14 months, so clusters must be upgraded at least once a year; managed services add their own (sometimes paid extended) support windows. Upgrade one minor version at a time, and check the deprecation guide for removed APIs first.

Resources

Last reviewed 21 October 2026. Release and support dates come from the official release pages linked above.

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