To check what apiVersion supports a Deployment resource in your kubernetes cluster you may run:

$ kubectl explain deployment | head -2

and you can be almost sure that the result will be as follows:

KIND:     Deployment
VERSION:  apps/v1

All modern kubernetes versions use apps/v1, which was available since v1.9, so for quite a long time already. As you may see here, older versions which were still available in kubernetes 1.15 have been deprecated in 1.16.

Client Version: v1.19.2 Server Version: v1.16.13

As stated above, in kubernetes 1.16, Deployment must use apps/v1 and there is no possibility to use older api versions like extensions/v1beta1, apps/v1beta1 or apps/v1beta2 which were still avilable in 1.15.

Your issue seems to me rather an error from Jenkins (possibly old version of Jenkins itself or some of its plugins or perhaps something with its configuration) which is not able to recognize/parse the correct (and currently required) apiVersion for Deployment resource.

For troubleshooting purpose you can try and change the apiVersion to one of the listed above. This should give you a different error (this time from kubernetes API server) as in 1.16 it won't be able to recognize it.

But at least it should give you a clue. If with older apiVersion your Jenkins doesn't complain any more, it would mean that it is set to work with older API versions and an update may help.

I see you filed an issue on kubernetes GitHub so let's wait what they say, but as I said before to me it doesn't look like an issue with kubernetes but rather with Jenkins ability to parse a legitimate Deployment yaml.

I updated my Kubernetes version from 1.5 to 1.9, when i force the Kubectl command, does work, just by Jenkis doesn't, as you request follow my k8sdeploy.yaml

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: cbbox
  labels: 
    app: cbbox  
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector: 
     matchLabels:
       app: cbbox 
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: cbbox
    spec:
      containers:      
      - image: myregistryrepository
        name: cbbox
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        ports:
        - containerPort: 8080
        env:
          - name: SECRET_DB_IP
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_DB_IP
          - name: SECRET_DB_PASSWORD
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_DB_PASSWORD
          - name: SECRET_DB_USER
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_DB_USER
          - name: SECRET_LDAP_DOMAIN
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_LDAP_DOMAIN
          - name: SECRET_LDAP_URLS
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_LDAP_URLS
          - name: SECRET_LDAP_BASE_DN
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_LDAP_BASE_DN
          - name: SECRET_TIME_ZONE
            valueFrom:
              secretKeyRef:
                name: cbboxsecret
                key: SECRET_TIME_ZONE
      imagePullSecrets:
        - name: acrcredentials
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: cbbox
spec: 
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - protocol: TCP
    port: 80
    targetPort: 8080
  selector:
    app: cbbox

Just check for case sensitivity in YAML file

In my case it was 'kind' field

kind: deployment

changed it to...

kind: Deployment