Kubernetes 1.28 Released — Improved Node Management and Sidecar Containers

Kubernetes 1.28 brings native sidecar containers as a first-class feature, significantly improving service mesh deployments and logging architectures.

Native Sidecar Containers

Previously sidecar containers were a pattern, not a feature. K8s 1.28 adds an initContainers field with restartPolicy: Always to define true sidecars.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
spec:
  initContainers:
  - name: log-collector
    image: fluentd:latest
    restartPolicy: Always  # This makes it a sidecar
  containers:
  - name: app
    image: myapp:latest

Node Lifecycle Improvements

# New: faster node drain with parallel pod termination
kubectl drain node-1 --grace-period=30 --timeout=120s

# Check node conditions
kubectl get node node-1 -o jsonpath='{.status.conditions}'

Install Kubernetes 1.28

curl -fsSL https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.28/deb/Release.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg
echo 'deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/kubernetes-apt-keyring.gpg] https://pkgs.k8s.io/core:/stable:/v1.28/deb/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y kubelet kubeadm kubectl

Conclusion

Kubernetes 1.28 is a mature, production-ready release. Our team provides container infrastructure management including Kubernetes deployment and maintenance.