Keeping up to date with the latest version of any software can be challenging at scale. With a core piece of software like Kubernetes, it's especially difficult. Kubernetes has always had quite a fast release cycle with new versions every 4 months and 1 year of support for releases, so it's important to stay on top of upgrades to avoid running unsupported versions.
These updates are critical from a security perspective, especially because Kubernetes is commonly exposed to the internet. In the event of an urgent security fix, you don’t want to have to jump several versions to get a patch.
With that backdrop in mind, it's always interesting to see whether organizations are keeping up with the pace of Kubernetes releases. We've looked at this trend before, noting slow adoption of new Kubernetes versions in our 2022 container report and then faster adoption in our 2023 container report.
Support changes
Since the last time we examined this issue, there have been some changes in how Kubernetes distributions handle support life cycles. Major distributions like Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) have introduced the concept of long-term support (LTS) versions, which extend the support life cycle provided by upstream Kubernetes, often in exchange for increased costs for the service.
This change means that it's a little tricky to say which versions of Kubernetes are in or out of support, but we can still classify clusters into one of three categories:
- Supported, mainstream support
- Supported, extended support
- Unsupported
As of October 1, 2025, all three of the aforementioned distributions had the same set of major Kubernetes versions in the three categories that we're interested in:
- Supported, mainstream support: version 1.31 or later
- Supported, extended support: versions 1.28–1.30
- Unsupported: versions earlier than 1.28
Currently deployed versions
With that background, let's look at the Kubernetes version data for October 1, 2025. This data is from Kubernetes-using organizations across Datadog’s customer base.
Based on this information, the news is actually pretty good for Kubernetes security. We can see that 78% of the hosts in the dataset are running on mainstream supported versions, with a further 19% on extended support and only 3% in the unsupported bucket. Zooming in on that unsupported category, we can see a long tail of Kubernetes versions going all the way back to Kubernetes 1.6, which still has a couple of hosts (hopefully just someone's nostalgia cluster).
If we look back at our data from previous years, these findings show progress from 2022. Back then, our report showed that most hosts were running an unsupported version of Kubernetes!
Conclusion
It's great to see the Kubernetes security landscape mature over time and organizations strive to keep versions updated. Helped by the introduction of LTS Kubernetes distributions, the problem of unsupported clusters is definitely getting smaller. However, organizations still have some work to do to reduce the size of that long tail of unsupported instances.
