Kubernetes v1.35 Timbernetes Analysis: GA After 6 Years, AI Scheduling, Technical Debt Improvements

Kubernetes v1.35 Timbernetes is the year-end major release resulting from a 14-week development cycle from September 15 to December 17, 2025, with participation from 419 core developers across 85 companies and 1,769 contributors across 281 companies. The release name carries a theme inspired by the world tree Yggdrasil, emphasizing the project's maturity and stability.

The biggest change is the GA transition of In-Place Pod Resource Resize. First proposed in 2019 as KEP-1287, it has now stabilized after 6 years, enabling CPU and memory resources to be adjusted without recreating running Pods. The resizePolicy also allows fine-grained control of restart policies per resource.

Changes targeting AI/ML and HPC are also notable.

• Gang Scheduling has entered Alpha, supporting All-or-Nothing scheduling at the PodGroup level.
• OCI Image Volume has reached GA, enabling read-only mounting of model weights or large assets as OCI registry images.

On the operations and security side, PreferSameNode has been added to Service trafficDistribution as GA, prioritizing Pods on the same node, and Structured Authentication Config has reached GA, allowing OIDC providers and CEL-based validation to be managed primarily through configuration files. At the same time, older elements such as cgroup v1, containerd 1.x, and flowcontrol.apiserver.k8s.io/v1beta2 are slated for cleanup, and the FAQ also recommends preparing for the transition of IPVS mode to nftables.