[ACTION REQUIRED] k8s.gcr.io image registry will be frozen on the 3rd of April 2023

[Mahamed Ali]

Hi All

The Kubernetes project runs a community-owned image registry called registry.k8s.io to host its container images. On the 3rd of April 2023, the old registry k8s.gcr.io will be frozen and no further images for Kubernetes and related subprojects will be pushed to the old registry.

This registry registry.k8s.io replaced the old one and has been generally available for several months. We have published a blog post about its benefits to the community and the Kubernetes project. This post also announced that future versions of Kubernetes will not be available in the old registry. Now that time has come.

What does this change mean for contributors:

• If you are a maintainer of a subproject, you will need to update your manifests and helm charts to use the new registry.

• You can run some of these queries to see where the old registry is being used:

• https://cs.k8s.io/?q=k8s.gcr.io&i=nope&files=%2F*.yaml%7C%2F*.sh&excludeFiles=&repos=

What does this change mean for end users:

• 1.27 Kubernetes release will not be published to the old registry.

• Patch releases for 1.24, 1.25, and 1.26 will no longer be published to the old registry from April. Please read the timelines below for details of the final patch releases in the old registry.

• Starting in 1.25, the default image registry has been set to registry.k8s.io. This value is overridable but will no longer work for any version of Kubernetes released after April as they won’t be present in the old registry.

• If you want to increase the reliability of your cluster and remove dependency on the community-owned registry or you are running Kubernetes in networks where external traffic is restricted, you should consider hosting local image registry mirrors. Some cloud vendors may offer hosted solutions for this.

Timeline of the Changes:

• k8s.gcr.io will be frozen on the 3rd of April 2023

• 1.27 is expected to be released on the 12th of April 2023

• The last 1.23 release on k8s.gcr.io will be 1.23.18 (1.23 goes EoL before the freeze)

• The last 1.24 release on k8s.gcr.io will be 1.24.12

• The last 1.25 release on k8s.gcr.io will be 1.25.8

• The last 1.26 release on k8s.gcr.io will be 1.26.3

Thank you

Mahamed Ali,

on behalf of Kubernetes SIG Release & K8s Infra