Kubernetes Release Calendar

Kubernetes Version	Upstream Release	FKE Preview	FKE GA	FKE Standard Support End
1.21	April 2021	June 2022	July 2022	September 2024
1.22	August 2021	February 2023	March 2023	November 2024
1.23	December 2021	June 2023	July 2023	February 2025
1.24	May 2022	August 2023	September 2023	May 2025
1.25	August 2022	September 2023	October 2023	August 2025
1.26	December 2022	December 2023	January 2024	November 2025
1.27	April 2023	December 2023	February 2024	February 2026
1.28	August 2023	February 2024	March 2024	May 2026
1.29	January 2024	April 2024	May 2024	August 2026
1.30	April 2024	April 2025	May 2025	November 2026
1.31	August 2024	April 2025	May 2025	February 2027
1.32

Important Notes on Using M-FKE

- Use of Namespaces: Create namespaces to separate and manage applications and environments more easily. Avoid using namespaces pre-created by the system for application deployment. Avoid deploying applications using namespaces created by the system.

- Worker Group Usage: When creating a k8s cluster, the system requires at least one worker group (base) to store system components (connectors, metrics servers, etc.). For production environments requiring high availability, we recommend configuring at least three workers in the base group and using separate worker groups for applications.

- Use Readiness & Liveness Probes: Ensure application availability.

Readiness Probes ensure requests are forwarded to a pod only when it is ready to accept them. Since pods typically take time to start up, configuring Readiness Probes prevents the service from forwarding requests to the pod during startup (when the application is not yet ready).

Liveness Probes ensure the pod running the application is in the Running state. If a Liveness Probe fails, the pod is restarted.

- Setting Resource Requests and Limits: This ensures containers have sufficient resources to run and do not exceed permitted resource amounts. Without limits, pods could consume resources beyond permitted amounts, potentially causing node crashes.

- Use autoscaling: Utilizing the autoscaling feature of Kubernetes HPA-based FKE enables your application to respond quickly to increased traffic. When traffic usage is low, the system automatically minimizes the number of Pods/nodes.

- Use multiple pods (two or more): To ensure high availability, we recommend using two or more pods per service. Use anti-affinity to ensure replica pods are deployed on different nodes.

- Use persistent volumes: M-FKE supports block storage.

Block storage is the system's default choice, supports RWO, and delivers excellent performance according to storage policies.

- Backup: Users must perform their own backups of data on PVCs (if any). After backing up to a VM, you can use the FCloud Backup & Recovery solution to back up the VM.

- Monitoring and Logging: Integrate monitoring and logging into your Kubernetes cluster using FMON. Set up alerts for your system.