Kubernetes 1.31 'Elli' Released

What happened

Kubernetes v1.31, codenamed Elli, was released on August 13, 2024, according to the official Kubernetes blog. It was the first release after the project celebrated its tenth anniversary, and consisted of 45 enhancements, with 11 graduating to stable, 22 entering beta and 12 new in alpha.

What graduated to stable

Among the features that reached general availability, Kubernetes support for AppArmor became stable, letting users protect containers by setting a field in the container's security context rather than the older annotation-based approach. Kube-proxy's improved ingress connectivity reliability also went stable, implementing connection draining for terminating nodes behind load-balancer services. A persistent-volume last-phase-transition-time field likewise graduated, giving operators a timestamp for volume phase changes.

Removals and maintenance mode

Elli completed a milestone that had been years in the making: the last in-tree cloud provider integrations were removed, finishing the externalisation process begun in v1.26 and moving Kubernetes closer to being a truly vendor-neutral platform. The release also moved cgroup v1 support into maintenance mode, encouraging migration to cgroup v2, and removed the in-tree CephFS and Ceph RBD volume plugins in favour of their CSI drivers.

Why it mattered

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration, so each quarterly release shapes how organisations run cloud-native workloads. Elli's stabilisations improved security and networking reliability, while the completion of cloud-provider externalisation and the shift of cgroup v1 to maintenance mode marked significant steps in the project's long-term architectural direction.

Related on Skillo

See also: Kubernetes 1.30 'Uwubernetes'.

Sources

• Kubernetes v1.31: Elli (official Kubernetes blog)

Published date reflects the original event date (2024-08-13). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.