How long is a version of Kubernetes (e.g., 1.7.x) supported? How many versions of Kubernetes back are supported for security and bug fixes? Is this documented somewhere?
Note, I've tried to locate this information in the community repo, on slack, on k8s.io, and using search engines. Have not been able to locate anything in writing. In conversations I've been given multiple answers that are not the same.
Matt,
At Kubernetes community, we define 3 types of Kubernetes releases:
At a single point of time, we develop the new "Major"/"Minor" version of Kubernetes (today - Kubernetes 1.9), and we support three existing releases as the "Patch" releases (today - 1.6.x, 1.7.x and 1.8.x).
When Kubernetes 1.9 will be released, and Kubernetes 1.10 development cycle will start, 1.9 will receive a status of "Patch" release (together with v1.8 and v1.7), and 1.6 will be marked as EOL.
The basic information about Kubernetes versioning is defined at the Versioning design doc.
The project-wide release process is managed by Kubernetes SIG-Release, while the releases itself are managed by the release teams (elected at per-release basis). Release teams, together with release timeline of a specific release, are defined at the kubernetes/features repo, for example, for Kubernetes 1.9.