k0s in 2025: A year of community growth, governance, and Kubernetes innovation

Major features and releases k0s recent and upcoming highlights k0s joining the CNCF sandbox k0s CNCF incubation application Community growth and adoption Events and community activities Looking ahead: What’s on the horizon for 2026 Deeper community collaboration Enhanced operational capabilities Transparent roadmap Gratitude and invitation k0s community Posted on January 26, 2026 by Prithvi Raj, CNCF Ambassador As we begin 2026, it’s worth reflecting on the remarkable progress we made with k0s as a project and as a community during 2025. Last year brought exciting advancements, adoption, and stronger community engagement. k0s is an open-source, single-binary Kubernetes distribution designed to be lightweight, simple to deploy, and highly flexible. The project aims to reduce the complexity of setting up and managing Kubernetes clusters. This 2025 review highlights the key milestones for k0s last year and paints a picture of the momentum carrying us into 2026. Last year, the k0s project continued to deliver enhancements focused on stability, extensibility, and multi‑environment operations. Key improvements included: Stable releases The k0s project had a total of 39 stable releases done in total. Kubernetes 1.34 is supported now; whereas Kubernetes 1.31 & 1.30 are already end of life. Operational and environmental flexibility Enhanced features tailored for edge use cases, improving resource efficiency and resilience in constrained environments. Usability improvements in installation, upgrades, and automation to lower the barrier for adoption while enabling more flexible deployment profiles for different workloads. Security and governance focus The k0s community has invested in security hardening, policy interoperability, and observability integrations to support end-users. Dynamic control plane load balancer A built-in control plane load balancer now simplifies HA setups.