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Gardener Review Meetings 2025 ​

Overview ​

In case you couldn't participate and are interested in catching up, you can find the contents of the review meetings we have had in 2025 here.

Check back regularly for updates and upcoming topics!

Reviews ​

2025/08/27 - v1.126 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@ScheererJ10m🌍 node-local-dns Enablement w/o Nodes Rollout#12422
@LucaBernstein5m🚨 Emergency Stop Of Shoot Reconciliations#12712

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [OPERATOR] ⚠️ The NewWorkerPoolHash feature gate has been promoted to beta and is now enabled by default. [...] All provider extensions must be upgraded to a version which includes Gardener v1.98.0 first to support this feature. #12550
  • 🐛 [USER] Errors that occur during Worker reconciliation are now also propagated to the Shoot status. #12769
  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] An issue causing the plutono-datasources ConfigMap to be reconciled by 2 ManagedResources when Seed is Garden managed by gardener-operator is now fixed. [...] #12798

2025/08/13 - v1.125 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@rfranzke10m🤖 GEP-28: ETCD Management Via etcd-druid#12391
@marc14045m🚫 No More RBAC Collisions In Kubeconfigs#12597
@ialidzhikov10m🙅🏼‍♂️ Global Max Allowed Values For VPA#12481
@AleksandarSavchev5m🧱 Robust Config Handling In gardener-node-agent#12589
@tobschli10m🐢 Cluster API Provider For Gardenercluster-api-provider-gardener (repo), blog post

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] Seed registration was fixed for ManagedSeeds with seed templates configuring spec.resources. #12652
  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] A bug in gardener-node-agent that prevented the location for the sandbox image to be configurable to a custom value on worker nodes with containerd v2.x was fixed. #12665
  • ✨ [DEVELOPER] The Concourse CICD pipeline has been migrated to GitHub Actions. #12592

2025/08/06 - Kubernetes v1.33 Special Edition ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenters: @Kostov6, @plkokanov, @RadaBDimitrova

DurationTopicReference(s)
15m🎓 Graduation Ceremony
Graduated Features		KEP-753, KEP-3850, KEP-3998, KEP-4193, KEP-2590, KEP-1880, KEP-3866, KEP-4444 & KEP-2433, KEP-2625, KEP-3633, KEP-3094, KEP-1495, KEP-2644, KEP-3857
15m🌸 Beta Bloom
Alpha -> Beta Promotions		KEP-5100, KEP-4381, KEP-4817, KEP-5142, KEP-4832, KEP-3257, KEP-3619, KEP-4639, KEP-127, KEP-4265, KEP-2902, KEP-3960 & KEP-4818, KEP-5073
10m🗞️ Fresh Off The Press
New Alpha Features		KEP-4951, KEP-4603, KEP-4960, KEP-5055 & KEP-4816 & KEP-5018 & KEP-4815, KEP-2535, KEP-4742, KEP-5067, KEP-5109, KEP-4205, KEP-4412, KEP-4049
5m🧼 Security, Deprecations & RemovalsCVE-2025-4563, KEP-4004. KEP-4974, KEP-5040, KEP-3503
5m🪴 What's Changing In Gardener#11033, #12343, #12115 & #12413, #11502

2025/07/30 - v1.124 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@timuthy10m🖼️ Image Rewriter Extensionextension-image-rewriter (repo)
@oliver-goetz5m✈️ L7 Load-Balancing Metrics Dashboards#12509
@domdom8210m🧦 CIDR Overlap w/ Seed For HA Shoots#12204
@vitanovs10m🚪 Vertical Pod Autoscaler Feature Gates#12339

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [USER] Starting with Kubernetes v1.34, setting the field .spec.cloudProfileName is be forbidden. The field will be dropped from existing Shoots once. Users are advised to drop this field and specify the cloud profile using the .spec.cloudProfile.name field instead. #11816
  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] A bug has been fixed which caused Pods from namespaces other than kube-system and labeled with node.gardener.cloud/critical-component=true to be considered by gardener-resource-manager. #12557
  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] A bug has been fixed which prevented the seed-specific Plutono dashboards from being provided by gardenlet in case its seed cluster was the garden runtime cluster at the same time. #12476

2025/07/16 - v1.123 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@LucaBernstein5m🪄 Defaulting Machine Image Version From Prefix#12374
@oliver-goetz10m😌 Simplified gardenlet Deployment Configuration#11996
@timebertt10m🏃‍➡️ Bastion Controller In provider-local#12366
@ishan1669615m🙅🏼‍♂️ Immutable Backup Buckets#12175

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [USER] The deprecated url annotation in <shoot-name>.monitoring secrets in the project namespace has been removed. Please use the plutono-url annotation instead. #12396
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] The NodeAgentAuthorizer feature gate has been graduated to GA and is locked to true. #12405
  • ✨ [DEVELOPER] BackupBucket/BackupEntry controllers now support WorkloadIdentity type of credentials, provider extensions may need to adjust the respective controllers or to explicitly disallow BackupBuckets of their type to configure WorkloadIdentity. #12321

The occurrence for the v1.122 release was skipped because of too few topics.

2025/06/25 - v1.121 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@RadaBDimitrova5m🩺 Improved Health Check For Rolling Updates#11869
@ashwani2k5m📣 dependency-watchdog Reports Scale Down#12272
@timebertt10m🍼 GEP-28: gardenadm bootstrap Progress#2906 (issue)
@timuthy5m🦾 New Capabilities For Extension Shoot Webhooks#12273
@vpnachev5m🙅 New DoNotCopyBackupCredentials Feature Gate#12168

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [OPERATOR] gardenlet no longer deploys ControlPlane resources with .spec.purpose=exposure for Shoots using unmanaged DNS provider. gardenlet will now cleanup any ControlPlane exposure resource as part of the reconciliation and deletion flows for such Shoots. #12162
  • 🐛 [USER] A bug causing the kube-apiserver to crash when anonymous authentication is configured via StructuredAuthentication was fixed. #12198
  • ✨ [DEVELOPER] Introduced new version classifications unavailable and expired. They are not meant to be set manually but should act as computed classification states. #12298

2025/06/18 - v1.120 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@DockToFuture10m👯 Single-Stack IPv4 -> Dual-Stack IPv{4,6} Migration For GCPextension-provider-gcp#1010
@nickytd5m🛰️ GEP-34: OpenTelemetry Operator And Collectors#11861
@oliver-goetz10m⚖️ Cluster-Internal L7 Load-Balancing Endpoints For kube-apiserversSummary
@timuthy10m🛸 Compatibility Fields In Extension API#11982

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • ✨ [OPERATOR] The Garden resource has been enhanced with a new field, spec.VirtualCluster.ETCD.Main.Backup.Region, which enables the configuration of the backup bucket region. Previously, the region was derived from the provider (spec.runtimeCluster.provider.region). This behavior remains as a fallback if the backup region is not explicitly specified. #12186
  • ✨ [DEVELOPER] The .spec.purpose field in the ControlPlane resource is now deprecated and will be removed in Gardener v1.123. In the times before SNI was introduced and unconditionally enabled it was previously used to manage control plane exposure. #12161

2025/06/11 - Hack The Garden Wrap Up ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@axel7born5m⚡️ Replace OpenVPN With WireguardSummary
@afritzler5m⛳️ Make gardener-operator Single-Node ReadySummary
@nickytd5m📡 OpenTelemetry Transport For Shoot MetricsSummary
@rickardsjp5m🔬 Cluster Network ObservabilitySummary
@tobschli5m📝 Signing Of ManagedResource SecretsSummary
@Gerrit915m🧰 Migrate ControlPlane Reconciliation Of Provider Extensions To ManagedResourcesSummary
@benedikt-haug5m✨ Dashboard Usability ImprovementsSummary
@klocke-io5m📜 Documentation RevampSummary
@Gerrit915mℹ️ Expose EgressCIDRs In shoot-info ConfigMapSummary
@kon-angelo5m📈 Overcome Maximum Of 450 Nodes On AzureSummary
@Nuckal7775m🦜 Multiple Parallel Versions In A Gardener Landscape (Canary Deployments)Summary
@rrhubenov5m🧑‍🔧 Worker Group Node Roll-outSummary
@kon-angelo5m👀 Instance Scheduled Events WatcherSummary

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • ⚖️ Cluster-Internal L7 Load-Balancing Endpoints For kube-apiservers. Summary
  • ♻️ GEP-32 – Version Classification Lifecycles. Summary

2025/05/21 - v1.119 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@timuthy10m🛡️ CVE-2025-47282, CVE-2025-47283, CVE-2025-47284#12136 (issue), #12137 (issue), external-dns-management#462 (issue)
@shafeeqes5m💪🏻 Forceful Redeployment Of gardenlets#11972
@rfranzke10mgardenadm token + gardenadm join#11934, #11942
@ScheererJ5mkube-proxy's Readiness Probe#12015

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • ✨ [OPERATOR] The support for the already deprecated shoot.gardener.cloud/managed-seed-api-server annotation is now removed. Instead, consider enabling high availability for the ManagedSeed's Shoot control plane. #11838
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] Spreading Istio ingress-gateway pods across hosts is enforced only for zonal Istio deployments now. #12007

2025/05/07 - v1.118 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@domdom8210m🧦 CIDR Overlap w/ Seed For Non-HA Shoots#11582
@vlerenc10m💰 Leaner Clusters, Lower Billsblog post
@grolu10m🕹 Recent Gardener Dashboard Features1.80.0 (release)
@shafeeqes, @ary199215m🦋 In-Place Node Updates#11191, #11393, #11631, #11713, #11718, #11843, #11844, #11953

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] Gardener core components are automatically restarted (due to a failing liveness probe) in case their Kubernetes API server watch caches do not sync for 3m. #11966
  • ✨ [USER] The CA bundle of the kubelet is now available via a ConfigMap the project's namespace, called <shoot-name>.ca-kubelet. #11916
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] The Seed API feature new field spec.backup.credentialsRef, it is of type corev1.ObjectReference and is allowed to refer to a Secret. #11583

2025/04/23 - v1.117 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@axel7born10m👯 Single-Stack IPv4 -> Dual-Stack IPv{4,6} Migration#11692
@oliver-goetz5m🐭 SPDY Support For L7 Load-Balancing#11807
@oliver-goetz10m🧑‍⚕️ Extension Care Controller#11769
@hendrikKahl5m🚀 machine-controller-manager Processing Throughput#11879

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [USER] The VPA version is updated to 1.3.0. Upstream VPA 1.3.0 does no longer serve API version autoscaling.k8s.io/v1beta2. Gardener's VPA installation will continue to serve API version autoscaling.k8s.io/v1beta2 until Gardener v1.119. [...] #11774
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] NamespacedCloudProfile.spec.limits.maxNodesTotal can now also be used to override the limit defined in the parent CloudProfile with an increased value. Increasing requires additional permissions granted by the custom verb raise-spec-limits. #11796
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] gardener-operator automatically adds the networking.resources.gardener.cloud/to-virtual-garden-kube-apiserver-tcp-443: allowed label to the gardenlet deployment in case it is deployed to the garden runtime cluster. Thus, it is not required anymore to configure this label in the Gardenlet resource. #11855

2025/04/09 - v1.116 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@vitanovs10m🎮 New ShootState Finalizer Controller#11491
@unmarshall, @Shreyas-s1410m🤖 etcd-druid CEL Validations + API Module#11545
@rfranzke5m👮 Bug Fixes In NetworkPolicy Controller#11780
@timuthy10m🧩 Extensions For Seed Reconciliations#11764
@ScheererJ10m🐓 GEP-28 Update: Autonomous Shoot Clusters#2906 (issue)

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [OPERATOR] Please note, if you configure spec.extensions in your Garden resource: gardener-operator adds a garden- prefix to all extension resources configured via the Garden. Existing extension resources (not prefixed) will be deleted automatically at the end of the reconciliation. [...]. #11764
  • 🪓 [DEVELOPER] The extension class field in the generic extension controller was removed. Please use the new field classes instead. #11764
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] The feature gate NewVPN has been graduated to GA. It was already enabled by default and can now no longer be turned off. The feature gate will be removed in a future release. #11714

2025/03/26 - v1.115 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@shafeeqes10m🗑️ Drop TokenInvalidator Controller And Webhook#11497
@LucaBernstein5m🔌 Latest NamespacedCloudProfiles Features#11647, #11550
@ialidzhikov10m🚏 Replace TopologyAwareHints With ServiceTrafficDistribution#11178
@ScheererJ5m⚙️ Better CoreDNS Configurability#11526
@oliver-goetz10m🌅 Drop HorizontalPodAutoscaler For gardener-apiserver#11684
@hendrikKahl5m🏃 GOAWAY Chance For gardener-apiserver#11551

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • ✨ [USER] If the Gardener operator has defined a control plane wildcard certificate, the .status.advertisedAddresses of the Shoot contain an entry with an endpoint secured by this certificate. Note that this endpoint is specific to the seed cluster the Shoot is scheduled to. Read all about it in this document. #11612
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] The injectGardenKubeconfig field is defaulted to true for extensions responsible for Worker resources when registered via the operator.gardener.cloud/v1alpha1.Extension API. #11658

2025/03/12 - v1.114 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@AleksandarSavchev5m⛔️ Deny-All NetworkPolicy In kube-system Namespace For Shoots#11502
@timuthy10m🍭 Minimum Resource Requirements For Shoot ETCD + API Server#11252
@timuthy5m🔨 Extension Example Manifest Generator#11329
@Wieneo5m🗑️ Dropping Reserved VPN Authz Server#11338
@oliver-goetz10m⚖️ L7 Load-Balancing For Requests To kube-apiservers#11085
@rfranzke5m🔑 Garden Access For Extensions No Longer By Default#11593

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🪓 [OPERATOR] ⚠️ Gardener does no longer support garden, seed, or shoot clusters with Kubernetes versions <= 1.26. Make sure to upgrade all existing clusters before upgrading to this Gardener version. #10664
  • 🪓 [USER] All Seeds are now automatically labeled with name.seed.gardener.cloud/<name>=true (⚠ no longer seed.gardener.cloud/<name>=true) where <name> is their own name, and (if applicable) the name of their parent seed in case they are managed seeds. This label can be used as selector for requests. #11479
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] gardener-operator now waits for required Extensions to get ready early in the reconcile flow. It addresses use-cases where extensions run mutating webhooks in the garden runtime cluster that must be present when Garden components are deployed. #11523

2025/03/05 - Kubernetes v1.32 Special Edition ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenters: @marc1404, @LucaBernstein

DurationTopicReference(s)
10m🎓 Graduation Ceremony
Graduated Features		KEP-4358, KEP-1967, KEP-4193, KEP-3221, KEP-1847
10m🌸 Beta Bloom
Alpha -> Beta Promotions		KEP-4368, KEP-4633, KEP-4247, KEP-1790, KEP-3476, KEP-4381, KEP-4601, KEP-3157
10m🗞️ Fresh Off The Press
New Alpha Features		KEP-4832, KEP-3962, KEP-2837, KEP-4818, KEP-4817, KEP-4827 & KEP-4828, KEP-4802 & KEP-4885
5m🧼 Security, Deprecations & RemovalsCVE-2025-0426, CVE-2024-9042, KEP-4381, kubernetes/kubernetes#127017
5m🪴 What's Changing In Gardener#11020, #10666, #10858

2025/02/26 - v1.113 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@maboehm5m👷 Maximum Node Count For Shoots#11279
@domdom825m👀 ACL Reconciliation On Infrastructure Changesextension-acl#105
@Wieneo5m🎭 GEP-30: Rework API Server Proxy#11214 (issue)
@ishan1669610m🐛 Fix Failing ETCD Restorationsetcd-backup-restore#778 (issue)
@timebertt5m🪜 Refactor E2E Tests To Ordered Its#11379 (issue)
@vpnachev5m📢 Public Gardener Information Discovery#11238

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • 🐛 [USER] The ETCD encryption config now properly configures a 32-byte key. #11150
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] Enhance the gardener-operator to allow specification of more than a single network range for .spec.runtimeCluster.networking.{nodes,pods,services}, and .spec.virtualCluster.networking.services, which also allows dual-stack configurations. #11251
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] Shoot system and Shoot control plane containers, which do not require privilege escalations, now forbid privilege escalation explicitly. There is an issue in Kubernetes about the privilege escalation configuration being true by default. #11241

2025/02/19 - v1.112 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@domdom825m🛡️ Prevent Leaking kube-apiserver's Service IP in Shoot#10949
@rfranzke10m🤹‍♂️ Credentials Rotation Without Workers Rollout#11027
@oliver-goetz5m🌯 Wrapper For OperatingSystemConfig Provisioning Script#11208
@marc140410m💥 Cluster Autoscaler Priority Expander Config#11045
@petersutter5m🗼 Structured Authentication With Dashboard#11080

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • ✨ [USER] All Seeds are now automatically labeled with seed.gardener.cloud/<name>=true where <name> is their own name, and (if applicable) the name of their parent seed in case they are managed seeds. This label can be used as selector for requests. #11062
  • 📖 [OPERATOR] Rewrite Setup Gardener document #11260

2025/02/12 - v1.111 Release ​

📽️ Recording

Demo Agenda 📋 ​

Presenter(s)DurationTopicReference(s)
@marc14045m⚙️ Default Machine Image Version#10954
@timuthy10m👨🏻‍🌾 Gardener Operator Manages Extension Resources#11192, #11001
@dimityrmirchev5m🚫 Secret/ConfigMap Tampering Protection#11108
@oliver-goetz5m🗑️ Improved Deletion Logic In gardener-node-agent#11015

No Demo, But Still Worth Celebrating 🎉 ​

  • ✨ [USER] Expired versions from the NamespacedCloudProfile are always dropped, except for already applied versions. #10910
  • ✨ [OPERATOR] Now vali contains the managed control plane logs from the early stages of Shoot reconcile. #11082
  • 🐛 [OPERATOR] An issue was fixed in gardener-operator that prevented configuring OIDC for gardener-dashboard while using Structured Authentication. #11080
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