pkgs.k8s.io: Introducing Kubernetes Community-Owned Package Repositories

pkgs.k8s.io: Introducing Kubernetes Community-Owned Package Repositories

Kubernetes SIG Release proudly unveils pkgs.k8s.io, a collection of community-owned software repositories for Debian and RPM packages.

These new repositories replace the Google-hosted apt.kubernetes.io and yum.kubernetes.io repositories, which have served Kubernetes users since version 1.5.        

This blog post contains information about these new package repositories, what does it mean to you as an end user, and how to migrate to the new repositories.

?? Update (August 31, 2023): the legacy Google-hosted repositories are deprecated and will be frozen starting with September 13, 2023. Check out the deprecation announcement for more details about this change.

What you need to know about the new package repositories?

(updated on August 31, 2023)

• This is an opt-in change; you're required to manually migrate from the Google-hosted repository to the Kubernetes community-owned repositories. See how to migrate later in this announcement for migration information and instructions.
• The legacy Google-hosted repositories are deprecated as of August 31, 2023, and will be frozen approximately as of September 13, 2023. The freeze will happen immediately following the patch releases that are scheduled for September 2023. Freezing the legacy repositories means that they will publish packages for the Kubernetes project only to the community-owned repositories as of the September 13, 2023 cut-off point. Check out the deprecation announcement for more details about this change.
• The existing packages in the legacy repositories will be available for the foreseeable future. However, the Kubernetes project can't provide any guarantees on how long is that going to be. The deprecated legacy repositories, and their contents, might be removed at any time in the future and without a further notice period.
• Given that no new releases will be published to the legacy repositories after the September 13, 2023 cut-off point, you will not be able to upgrade to any patch or minor release made from that date onwards if you don't migrate to the new Kubernetes package repositories. That said, recommend migrating to the new Kubernetes package repositories as soon as possible.
• The new Kubernetes package repositories contain packages beginning with those Kubernetes versions that were still under support when the community took over the package builds. This means that anything before v1.24.0 will only be available in the Google-hosted repository.
• There's a dedicated package repository for each Kubernetes minor version. When upgrading to a different minor release, you must bear in mind that the package repository details also change.

Why are they introducing new package repositories?

As the Kubernetes project is growing, to ensure the best possible experience for the end users. The Google-hosted repository has been serving us well for many years, but we started facing some problems that require significant changes to how we publish packages. Another goal that we have is to use community-owned infrastructure for all critical components and that includes package repositories.

Publishing packages to the Google-hosted repository is a manual process that can be done only by a team of Google employees called Google Build Admins. The Kubernetes Release Managers team is a very diverse team especially in terms of timezones that they work in. Given this constraint, they have to do very careful planning for every release to ensure that they have both Release Manager and Google Build Admin available to carry out the release.

Another problem is that only have a single package repository. Because of this, we were not able to publish packages for prerelease versions (alpha, beta, and rc). This made testing Kubernetes prereleases harder for anyone who is interested to do so. The feedback that we receive from people testing these releases is critical to ensure the best quality of releases, so we want to make testing these releases as easy as possible. On top of that, having only one repository limited us when it comes to publishing dependencies like cri-tools and kubernetes-cni.

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2023/08/15/pkgs-k8s-io-introduction/#how-to-migrate