Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Kubernetes Engine (OKE) now supports Kubernetes v1.36, enabling customers to run the latest upstream Kubernetes with improved security, resource management, and operational simplicity.
Kubernetes v1.36, released by upstream on April 22, 2026, introduces a wide range of enhancements, with several features graduating to General Availability (GA) and beta.
- Fine-grained Kubelet API Authorization (GA): Enables least-privilege access control for the kubelet API, eliminating the need for overly broad nodes/proxy permissions in monitoring and observability use cases.
- User Namespaces (GA): Improves pod isolation by enabling rootless containers, strengthening multi-tenant security.
- Mutating Admission Policies (GA): Simplifies policy management by replacing webhook-based mutations with built-in CEL-based policies.
- Dynamic Resource Allocation (GA): Enhances scheduling and management of GPUs and specialized hardware for AI/ML workloads.
These improvements strengthen security, simplify cluster operations, and support modern workloads such as AI/ML at scale.
You can start using Kubernetes v1.36 on OKE today by creating new clusters or upgrading existing ones through the Oracle Cloud Console, CLI, API, SDK and Terraform.
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