The Kubernetes release team has announced version 1.33, codenamed Octarine. This release brings several long-running enhancements to GA status and improves operational ergonomics across the board.
In-Place Pod Vertical Scaling (GA)
You can now change a pod's CPU and memory requests/limits without restarting it. Combined with VPA, this enables true live rightsizing for long-running workloads like databases, caches, and stateful services that dislike disruption.
Native Sidecars Stable
After three releases in beta, restartPolicy: Always on init containers (aka native sidecars) is stable. Sidecars now have guaranteed startup ordering, graceful shutdown, and don't block job completion — solving long-standing pain points with service mesh proxies and log shippers.
Scheduler Improvements
The default scheduler gains better support for heterogeneous node pools, with improved scoring for nodes containing GPUs, high-memory instances, or specialized hardware. New DeviceClass API (alpha) standardizes how third-party accelerators are requested.
Upgrade guides and full release notes are available at kubernetes.io/releases/1.33.
