Alpha, Beta, and Stable
Learn how we can add new resources to the API.
We'll cover the following...
Kubernetes has a strict process for accepting new API resources. New resources come in as alpha, progress through beta, and eventually graduate as Generally Available (GA). We sometimes refer to GA as stable.
Alpha resources are experimental and should be considered hairy and scary. Expect bugs, expect features to be dropped without warning, and expect lots of things to change when they move into beta. A lot of clusters turn off alpha APIs by default.
Lifecycle of Kubernetes API resources
A new resource called xyz in the apps API group that goes through two alpha versions will have the following API names:
/apis/apps/v1alpha1/xyz/apis/apps/v1alpha2/xyz
The phase after alpha is beta.
Beta resources are considered pre-release and are starting to look like the final GA product. However, we should expect small changes when promoted to GA. Most clusters enable beta APIs by default, and some people use beta resources in production. However, that’s not a recommendation, we need to make those decisions ourselves.
The same xyz resource in the apps API group that progresses through two beta versions will be served through the following APIs:
/apis/apps/v1beta1/xyz/apis/apps/v1beta2/xyz
The final phase after beta is ...