Learning about cluster maintenance and upgrades

In this section, we will learn about upgrading our Kubernetes clusters in production. Generally, a new major Kubernetes version is announced quarterly, and every minor version is supported around 12 months after its initial release date. Following the rule of thumb for software upgrades, it is not common to upgrade to a new version immediately after its release unless it is a severe time-sensitive security patch. Cloud providers also follow the same practice and run their conformance tests before releasing a new image to the public. Therefore, cloud providers' Kubernetes releases usually follow a couple of versions behind the upstream release of Kubernetes. If you'd like to read about the latest releases, you can find the Kubernetes release notes on the official Kubernetes documentation site at https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/release/notes/.

In Chapter 3, Provisioning Kubernetes Clusters Using AWS and Terraform, we learned...