Version support

Review the following information about supported release versions for K8sGateway OSS (open source).

Supported versions

K8sGateway	Kubernetes	Envoy	Helm	Istio†
1.18.x	1.25 - 1.29	v3 xDS API	>= 3.12	1.16 - 1.22

Image variants

For some K8sGateway component images, the following image variants are supported.

• Standard: The default image variant provided by K8sGateway. The standard variant does not require a tag on the image.
• Distroless: An image tagged with -distroless is a slimmed-down distribution with the minimum set of binary dependencies to run the image, for enhanced performance and security. Distroless images do not contain package managers, shells, or any other programs that are generally found in a standard Linux distribution. The use of distroless variants is a standard practice adopted by various open source projects and proprietary applications.

K8sGateway supports image variants for the following component images:

• access-logger
• certgen
• discovery
• gloo
• gloo-envoy-wrapper
• ingress
• kubectl
• sds

You have two options for specifying the variant for a K8sGateway image in your Helm values:

• Specify the image variant for all K8sGateway components in the global.image.variant Helm field. Supported values include standard, and distroless. If unset, the default value is standard.
• Specify images for individual components by using variant tags in the gloo.<component>.deployment.image.tag field of the component’s Helm settings, such as quay.io/solo-io/gloo:v1.18.0-beta32-distroless.

Release cadence

Stable builds for K8sGateway are released as minor versions approximately every three months. A stable branch for a minor version, such as 1.18, is tagged from main, and stable builds are supported from that branch.

Release development

Beta release process

New features for K8sGateway are developed on main. The latest version is released as a patch off of main.

Stable release process

Development of a quality stable release on main typically follows this process:

1. New feature development is suspended on main.
2. Release candidates are created, such as 1.18.0-rc1, 1.18.0-rc2, and so on.
3. A full suite of tests is performed for each release candidate. Testing includes all documented workflows, a test matrix of all supported platforms, and more.
4. Documentation for that release is prepared, vetted, and staged.
5. The stable minor version is released.
6. Feature development on main is resumed.

Additional release information

New features are not developed on or backported to stable branches. However, critical patches, bug fixes, and documentation fixes are backported to all actively supported branches.