Kubernetes v1.36 (Haru) ships 70 enhancements with a strong focus on security hardening, AI/ML workload support, and API scalability. Key features graduating to General Availability include User Namespaces (mapping container root to unprivileged host users), Mutating Admission Policies via CEL (replacing webhook servers), and Fine-Grained Kubelet API Authorization. For AI workloads, multiple Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) enhancements reach Beta and are enabled by default, replacing the integer-GPU model with primitives supporting partitioning, sharing, and recovery of accelerators. A new alpha feature, Workload-Aware Preemption, treats PodGroups as single preemption units to prevent partial failures in distributed training jobs. Notable removals include the gitRepo volume plugin (deprecated since v1.11), IPVS mode in kube-proxy, and flex-volume support. The Ingress NGINX project was also retired in March 2026 with no further security patches.
