Kubernetes v1.37 "Garhwal" Ships, Promoting the Metrics API to Stable

Kubernetes v1.37, code-named Garhwal, shipped on August 26, 2026, closing a 15-week release cycle with contributions from more than 200 companies and 1,700+ individuals. The release carries 67 enhancements in total: 16 graduate to stable, 23 move to beta, 27 land in alpha, and one feature is deprecated. The headline stable graduation is the Metrics API (metrics.k8s.io), which becomes a first-class, versioned API for autoscalers and dashboards after years as a de facto standard built on an unversioned API. StatefulSets gain a new Recreate update strategy, ClusterTrustBundle moves to stable for managing trusted certificate bundles cluster-wide, and workload-aware scheduler preemption continues to mature in beta alongside a default-enabled beta for tracking unused PersistentVolumeClaims. On the cleanup side, kubectl run --filename is now deprecated, static pods can no longer reference Secrets or ConfigMaps, and both IPVS mode in kube-proxy and cgroup v1 support keep sliding toward removal. For teams running production clusters, this is a release worth scheduling an upgrade window around rather than skipping.

This is a summary by our content curator. Read the original at Kubernetes Blog: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2026/08/26/kubernetes-v1-37-release/.