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Programmers love the best and newest releases. Businesses? Not so much. They want stability. So it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise that Canonical, Ubuntu Linux‘s parent company, has unveiled its Kubernetes Long Term Support (LTS) offering, which provides an unprecedented 12 years of support. For example, the most recent Canonical Kubernetes release, 1.32, will be supported until 2037.
Canonical’s move represents a major shift in the Kubernetes landscape, where rapid innovation has been the norm. According to Canonical, Kubernetes, which typically sees new versions released every four months, has reached a maturity level allowing for longer-term stability options.
Currently, Kubernetes provides approximately 14 months of support for each minor version release. This support period is divided into two phases. The first is standard, which lasts 12 months and includes regular bug fixes, security patches and feature enhancements. The open source projects offer a two-month extended support period following the standard support phase. During the extended support phase, only critical security patches are issued.
In its press release, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth described the frequent updates required by Kubernetes as “a drain on enterprise teams” and emphasized the need for an alternative that prioritizes long-term stability.” Customers who deploy Canonical Kubernetes 1.32 LTS can focus on the future because their clusters will receive security updates for 12 years.”
Now, Canonical is not the only Kubernetes distributor that offers LTS. For example, Red Hat offers three years of Extended Update Support (EUS) for OpenShift 4.14 and subsequent even-numbered Red Hat OpenShift 4.x series releases. Most cloud vendors also offer support beyond what the Kubernetes project offers. For instance, Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) offers two years of support, while Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) provides an additional year of extended support.
Canonical, however, goes beyond that with its LTS offering. Besides the dozen years of support, Canonical plans to release new Kubernetes LTS versions every two years, with interim updates every four months.
Specifically, Canonical will provide interim releases of its Kubernetes packages every four months, aligned with the upstream Kubernetes release cadence and versions. These interim releases will be security-maintained and supported for 14 months, with upgrade paths from release to release.
Starting with Canonical Kubernetes 1.32 LTS, users with an Ubuntu Pro subscription, these LTS releases will get Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) security fixes for at least 12 years. Thereafter, Canonical promises to support and patch these releases of Kubernetes based on customer needs for extremely long-term deployments.
This is all of a piece with Canonical’s other recent support extensions. Last year, Canonical extended its Ubuntu Linux support for 12 years and customized Docker container LTS Linux images via its Everything LTS service.
Besides Kubernetes itself, the Canonical offering also comes with Cilium, MetalLB, CoreDNS, OpenEBS and Metrics Server by default. Customers can replace these components, but the replacement components won’t have long-term support. In addition, Canonical also provides standardized container images of popular Kubernetes services such as Istio, Cert Manager and OpenTelemetry Collector. In short, you get a complete Kubernetes environment, not just the bare bones.
Some people on the Reddit Kubernetes subreddit aren’t pleased with Canonical’s providing LTS Kubernetes support. As a platform engineer said, “If you’re running 1.32 in 12 years, you’re doing something wrong.” Others, though, are tired of Kubernetes’ constant upgrades. “The API is pretty mature now. If it covers everything you need, why should there need to be major upgrades all the time?”
Of course, if you don’t want to use the LTS version of Canonical Kubernetes, you don’t have to. As Marcin Stożek, product manager for Kubernetes at Canonical, said in the press release: “Canonical Kubernetes Platform offers the freedom to operate Kubernetes your own way. It enables you to choose between automatic cluster upgrades or staying on a long-term supported release for extended stability.”
Ultimately, your cloud native computing foundation decision will be up to you. It is nice, though, that Canonical is giving those who value long-term stability over everything else this choice.
