Kubernetes v1.33: Continuing the transition from Endpoints to EndpointSlices

Kubernetes v1.33: Continuing the transition from Endpoints to EndpointSlices Notes on migrating from Endpoints to EndpointSlices Consuming EndpointSlices rather than Endpoints Generating EndpointSlices rather than Endpoints Since the addition of EndpointSlices ( KEP-752 ) as alpha in v1.15 and later GA in v1.21, the Endpoints API in Kubernetes has been gathering dust. New Service features like dual-stack networking and traffic distribution are only supported via the EndpointSlice API, so all service proxies, Gateway API implementations, and similar controllers have had to be ported from using Endpoints to using EndpointSlices. At this point, the Endpoints API is really only there to avoid breaking end user workloads and scripts that still make use of it. As of Kubernetes 1.33, the Endpoints API is now officially deprecated, and the API server will return warnings to users who read or write Endpoints resources rather than using EndpointSlices. Eventually, the plan (as documented in KEP-4974 ) is to change the Kubernetes Conformance criteria to no longer require that clusters run the Endpoints controller (which generates Endpoints objects based on Services and Pods), to avoid doing work that is unneeded in most modern-day clusters. Thus, while the Kubernetes deprecation policy means that the Endpoints type itself will probably never completely go away, users who still have workloads or scripts that use the Endpoints API should start migrating them to EndpointSlices. For end users, the biggest change between the Endpoints API and the EndpointSlice API is that while every Service with a selector has exactly 1 Endpoints object (with the same name as the Service), a Service may have any number of EndpointSlices associated with it: selector $ kubectl get endpoints myservice Warning: v1 Endpoints is deprecated in v1.33+; use discovery. k8s. io/v1 EndpointSlice NAME ENDPOINTS AGE myservice 10.180.3.17:443 1h $ kubectl get endpointslice -l kubernetes. io/service-name = myservice NAME ADDRESSTYPE PORTS ENDPOINTS AGE myservice-7vzhx IPv4 443 10.180.3.17 21s myservice-jcv8s IPv6 443 2001:db8:0123::5 21s $ kubectl get endpoints myservice Warning: v1 Endpoints is deprecated in v1.33+; use discovery. k8s. io/v1 EndpointSlice NAME ENDPOINTS AGE myservice 10.180.3.17:443 1h $ kubectl get endpointslice -l kubernetes.