Kubernetes 1.26 includes a total of 37 enhancements. The Kubernetes maintainers also announced that twelve features are being deprecated or removed. 

One major change is that this is the first release published in the new registry.k8s.io image registry. The container registry was changed in the previous release. 

The new version has many storage improvements including CSI migration for Azure File and vSphere graduating to stable. 

Also, the added ability to delegate FSGroup to CSI Driver has graduated to stable and the feature allows drivers to use mount options to control volume permissions. This is achieved by allowing Kubernetes to supply the pod’s ‘fsGroup’ to the CSI driver when a volume is mounted. 

Improvements to Kubernetes metrics include the graduation of the metrics framework extension and Component Health Service Level Indicators to alpha. Feature metrics, which make it possible to track whether each active feature gate is enabled by checking the component’s metric endpoint for ‘kubernetes_feature_enabled’ is now available. 

The new Dynamic Resource Allocation feature that offers an alternative to the limited “countable” interface for requesting access to resources and provides an API more akin to that of persistent volumes also graduated to alpha. 

The full list of features is available here.