Kubernetes 1.28 released in August 2023 with continued incremental improvements. The bigger story is what the Kubernetes ecosystem looks like five years after 1.0: mature, wide, and increasingly specialised.
What 1.28 brought
Kubernetes 1.28 promoted several features from alpha and beta: improvements to node lifecycle, sidecar containers (finally) moving toward stability, and networking enhancements. The headline feature is sidecar support as a first-class concept. Sidecar containers run alongside the main container in a pod and previously lacked the ability to define startup ordering. With native sidecar support, you can declare that a container is a sidecar, and Kubernetes will start it before the main container and keep it running until after the main container exits.
The ecosystem maturity
The CNCF landscape document has over 1,000 projects. The core question for engineering teams is no longer whether to use Kubernetes but which of the Kubernetes-adjacent tools to standardise on. Service mesh (Istio, Linkerd, Cilium), GitOps (Flux, ArgoCD), secrets management (Vault, ESO), observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana): each category has established patterns and the decision is which combination fits your organisation's capabilities and compliance requirements.
The managed Kubernetes reality
Most teams running Kubernetes in production run it on a managed service: EKS, AKS, or GKE. The version selection and upgrade cycle on managed services runs 3-6 months behind upstream. What matters in practice is not the upstream 1.28 release but when EKS, AKS, and GKE support it and what the upgrade impact is on workloads. The operational burden of running Kubernetes has reduced significantly as managed services have matured.
Platform engineering as the next layer
The Kubernetes explosion has created a secondary challenge: too many ways to do the same thing. Platform engineering, building internal developer platforms on top of Kubernetes that abstract away the cluster management, has become an organisational response. Backstage as the developer portal, Crossplane for infrastructure provisioning, Helm or Kustomize for application deployment, and a GitOps pipeline on top: this is what a mature internal platform looks like in 2023.