Hey all my Kubernetes homelabbers, the Kubernetes 1.33 release has officially gone GA packed . It's packed with some powerful new features that will provide new ways of how we manage persistent storage, autoscaling, and networking in our clusters. Here's a quick summary of the highlights:
🔄 Volume Populators Go GA
Volume Populators are now stable. This means you can now pre-populate your PVCs with data from sources other than just volume snapshots or clones.
This is enabled using the dataSourceRef field. It also requires a CRD and the volume-data-source-validator controller in your cluster. Super helpful for scenarios like injecting test data or restoring from backups using custom controllers.
Below is an example of how to use the volume populators:
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
name: pvc1
spec:
...
dataSourceRef:
apiGroup: provider.example.com
kind: Provider
name: provider1
🧹 PersistentVolume Reclaim Policy Fixes
There’s now a new protection in place for persistent volumes (PVs) when using the “Delete” reclaim policy. Before, if you deleted a PV before the PVC, the deletion logic might get skipped. Kubernetes 1.33 introduces new finalizers to make sure the reclaim policy is carried out no matter the order in which things are deleted.
⚠️ Endpoints API Deprecation
The old Endpoints API is now officially deprecated. If you're still using it, you'll start seeing warnings. The Kubernetes team recommends switching to EndpointSlices. These have been stable since the release of 1.21 and have better scalability.
📈 Horizontal Pod Autoscaler Tolerance (Alpha)
K8s 1.33 adds another new feature in alpha that allows you to tweak the tolerance level for HPA metrics. This will mean fewer unnecessary scale-up/scale-down events. Even when your resource usage fluctuates just slightly. This gives more control for production environments.
🔥 nftables Mode in Kube-Proxy (GA)
The long-awaited nftables mode for kube-proxy is coming to GA in 1.33. It replaces iptables for better performance and scalability. This is true especially on modern Linux kernels. The iptables module is the default for now, but nftables is the path forward.
These changes bring exciting new capabilities and performance boosts, especially for home labbers and platform engineers. If you are working with persistent storage and autoscaling in Kubernetes this release contains a lot of great new functionality.
Check out the full release notes and blog here: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/05/08/kubernetes-v1-33-volume-populators-ga/
Anyone updated to 1.33 already and testing things out?
