August 5, 2026
GEP-28 describes Gardener's model for self-hosted shoot clusters — shoot clusters whose control planes run not in a dedicated seed, but on the shoot's own infrastructure. The reference implementation targets local KinD-based setups, but the goal was always broader provider coverage. With v1.148, self-hosted shoots now work on OpenStack.
July 23, 2026
When a node fails in a Kubernetes cluster, the normal response is immediate replacement: Machine Controller Manager (MCM) terminates the failed machine and creates a new one. This is the right default for self-healing clusters, but it leaves operators with a narrow window — or none at all — to investigate what went wrong.
July 8, 2026
Managing a Gardener landscape involves deploying and keeping in sync a large collection of components — the Gardener core components, provider, network, OS and general extensions, and their configurations. Until now, each operator had to solve this problem individually. The Gardener Landscape Kit (GLK), proposed with GEP-49 , aims to close that gap by provid...
June 11, 2026
Managing storage in Kubernetes is a manual affair. PersistentVolumeClaims don't grow on their own — operators must either over-provision from the start (wasting resources on underutilized clusters) or manually resize when things get tight (risking downtime on busy ones). In large Gardener landscapes with hundreds of monitoring stacks, this doesn't scale.
June 10, 2026
Modern AI training and inference workloads demand extreme inter-node communication bandwidth. A single GPU is rarely enough — distributed training jobs span dozens or hundreds of nodes, each running multiple GPUs that must exchange large tensors rapidly. On AWS, the technology that makes this possible is the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA): a high-performance n...
May 21, 2026
With Gardener v1.142, the deprecated gardener/controlplane Helm chart has been removed. All local development scenarios and e2e tests now run exclusively on gardener-operator — the canonical way to deploy Gardener. This marks the end of a migration journey that began over a year ago.
May 21, 2026
With Gardener v1.142, we introduce GinD (Gardener-in-Docker) — a Docker Compose-based local development setup for self-hosted shoots with unmanaged infrastructure. Instead of running machine pods inside a KinD cluster, GinD runs Docker containers directly as machines, providing a more realistic "bare metal" experience while eliminating KinD overhead for this...
May 19, 2026
As Kubernetes workloads evolve, the need for dynamic resource adjustments becomes increasingly critical. Traditional Pod resource updates require Pod recreation, leading to increased operational costs and potential service disruptions. To address this shortcoming, Kubernetes introduced a new way of updating Pod resources in-place , without the need to evict...
May 13, 2026
From May 4–8, 2026, the Gardener community gathered at Schlosshof in Schelklingen for another week of focused collaboration. The full per-topic write-up is available on the community page , and the review meeting recording covers the highlights. Continue reading to find out more about larger storylines that emerged!
May 11, 2026
The Gardener Dashboard 1.84.0 release brings a dedicated Seeds view, vendor branding, improved DNS handling, and several operator and user experience enhancements.
May 5, 2026
Gardener now supports Workload Identity Federation for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Instead of storing long-lived static credentials (access keys, service principal secrets, service account keys), you can configure trust between your cloud account and the Gardener Workload Identity Issuer. Gardener then issues short-lived, auto-rotated JSON Web Tokens that your shoo...
April 29, 2026
Gardener's etcd management component, etcd-druid , now supports upgrading etcd from version 3.4 to 3.5. This capability, introduced behind the UpgradeEtcdVersion feature gate in etcd-druid v0.36.3, provides a safe, automated upgrade path with built-in rollback support.
April 29, 2026
The Kubernetes community retired Ingress NGINX in March 2026. Gardener has completed a full migration of its core components away from Ingress NGINX to Istio's native API — using VirtualService and Gateway resources for all incoming traffic routing.
April 29, 2026
Gardener's local development setup now includes a proper cloud-controller-manager that implements LoadBalancer services dynamically — replacing the previous hard-coded port mapping hacks and enabling load balancers in local shoot clusters for the first time.
April 1, 2026
Gardener continuously evolves to provide operators with more granular control over their Kubernetes landscapes. A recent enhancement introduces zone-aware placement for Shoot control planes, allowing operators to optimize for latency and reduce cross-zonal traffic costs.
April 1, 2026
With the official retirement of the Ingress-NGINX controller from the Kubernetes project, Gardener is introducing a new, robust, and feature-rich alternative: the gardener-extension-shoot-traefik . This extension allows you to use Traefik as the ingress controller for your Shoot clusters, providing a modern and powerful solution for managing external access...
March 18, 2026
The Gardener team is excited to announce a significant overhaul of the development setup for working with provider extensions. The former provider-extensions setup, which relied on a deprecated Helm chart, has been completely replaced by a new, streamlined remote setup based on gardener-operator .
March 4, 2026
As part of Gardener's ongoing effort to evolve its observability stack, outlined in GEP-35 , the first step has been taken to integrate VictoriaLogs as the future log aggregation system, eventually replacing Vali. A new feature gate, VictoriaLogsBackend , has been introduced to facilitate a smooth, phased migration.
February 18, 2026
Gardener continues to enhance its security and flexibility, particularly for users operating in air-gapped environments or utilizing private infrastructure. A new feature now allows operators to specify a custom Certificate Authority (CA) bundle when pulling Helm charts from OCI registries. This is a significant improvement for environments where registries...
February 18, 2026
Switching networking configurations in a live Kubernetes cluster is a delicate operation where timing is everything. A common scenario for Gardener operators is transitioning a cluster's Calico networking from an overlay mode (like IPIP) to a non-overlay, native routing mode. Previously, this switch could lead to temporary network disruptions. We're happy to...
February 18, 2026
Managing configurations consistently across a fleet of Kubernetes clusters can be a complex task. Operators often need a straightforward way to deploy baseline resources—such as security policies, resource quotas, or RBAC rules—to all or a subset of their clusters without the overhead of building and maintaining a full-blown extension.
January 28, 2026
Maintaining a strong security posture is crucial for any Kubernetes environment. A key aspect of this is the regular rotation of credentials. To simplify this essential task and reduce operational overhead, Gardener now supports the automatic rotation of several critical credentials during a Shoot cluster's maintenance window.
December 3, 2025
From November 24–28, 2025, the Gardener community gathered at Schlosshof in Schelklingen for another week of focused collaboration, organized by x-cellent . The full per-topic write-up is available on the community page , and the review meeting recording covers the highlights. Continue reading to find out more about the larger storylines that emerged!
November 12, 2025
We are happy to announce that Gardener is one of the first Kubernetes offerings to report official AI Conformance, as defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) Kubernetes AI Conformance Working Group. This significant milestone underscores Gardener's commitment to providing a robust, scalable, and reliable platform for running modern, resourc...
November 12, 2025
PromCon EU 2025, the 10th annual conference for Prometheus users and developers, took place on October 21st and 22nd. After being held in Berlin for two years, the event was kindly hosted by Google in Munich again this year. Since Prometheus and related tools are the core of Gardener's monitoring stack, we were excited to attend, connect with the community,...
October 27, 2025
Gardener is committed to making node-local-dns a standard feature across all shoot clusters to enhance DNS performance and reliability. A recent enhancement ensures that enabling this feature is a seamless experience, even for clusters with specialized DNS configurations. Gardener now supports applying custom CoreDNS rules directly within node-local-dns .
October 22, 2025
Gardener has introduced a new feature that enhances the discoverability of services running within a Shoot's control plane. While the .status.advertisedAddresses field in the Shoot resource has always provided key endpoints like the API server URL, it now supports extension by other components.
October 22, 2025
Gardener is simplifying its networking infrastructure by moving towards a single, unified entrypoint for all HTTP CONNECT proxy traffic. This change, introduced as part of GEP-30 , aims to streamline configuration and reduce complexity.
October 8, 2025
Gardener continues to expand its storage capabilities, now offering integrated support for managed Network File System (NFS) services on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These additions provide a straightforward way to provision shared, persistent storage with ReadWriteMany access for workloads that require concurrent access from mu...
September 10, 2025
Gardener's DNS management capabilities have been enhanced to provide a more explicit, secure, and flexible method for configuring internal DNS for Seed clusters. This change moves away from a global, label-based secret selection to a direct configuration within the Seed API.
September 10, 2025
Gardener is introducing a significant enhancement to its logging architecture for shoot clusters. By enabling the new OpenTelemetryCollector feature gate, shoots will be instrumented with the power and flexibility of the OpenTelemetry Collector to process and route shoot logs. This marks a key step in the evolution of Gardener's observability stack, as outli...
September 5, 2025
The internet is built on the Internet Protocol (IP), and for decades, its fourth version, IPv4, has been the bedrock of global connectivity. However, the explosive growth of the internet, a phenomenon that began in the 1990s, made it clear that the 32-bit address space of IPv4 was finite and rapidly depleting. The long-foreseen solution, IPv6, with its vast...
August 27, 2025
The node-local-dns feature in Kubernetes significantly improves DNS reliability and performance by running a dedicated caching agent on each cluster node. However, enabling or disabling this feature in Gardener historically required a full, time-consuming rolling update of all worker nodes. A recent enhancement streamlines this process, improving operational...
August 27, 2025
In large-scale Kubernetes landscapes, ensuring stability during updates is paramount. A faulty configuration or update can propagate quickly, potentially impacting numerous clusters. To provide operators with a powerful tool to mitigate such risks, Gardener has introduced an emergency stop mechanism for Shoot reconciliations.
August 13, 2025
Running Kubernetes clusters at scale comes with its own challenges.
August 4, 2025
We're pleased to announce the release of cluster-api-provider-gardener (CAPGa) , an open-source Cluster API provider that leverages Gardener as the underlying platform for cluster lifecycle management.
July 30, 2025
Gardener continues to enhance its networking capabilities, offering users greater flexibility in managing their cluster landscapes. A significant advancement is the extension of IPv4 network overlap support to Shoot clusters with high-availability (HA) control planes. Previously a feature exclusive to non-HA Shoots, this update allows both single-stack IPv4...
July 16, 2025
Gardener has introduced support for immutable backup buckets, a critical feature for enhancing the security and resilience of your Kubernetes clusters. This new capability leverages native cloud provider features to protect your etcd backups from accidental or malicious deletion and modification, helping you meet stringent security and compliance requirement...
June 30, 2025
In this blog post, we will explore how to set up an OpenTelemetry based observability stack on a Gardener shoot cluster. OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides a set of APIs, SDKs, agents, and instrumentation to collect telemetry data from applications and systems. It provides a unified approach for collecting, processing, and...
June 25, 2025
Gardener continues to enhance its networking capabilities, now offering a streamlined migration path for existing IPv4-only shoot clusters on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6). This allows clusters to leverage the benefits of IPv6 networking while maintaining IPv4 compatibility.
June 25, 2025
For operators managing Kubernetes clusters, clear and accurate health status is essential for stability and efficient troubleshooting. A recent enhancement to Gardener's shoot-care controller improves the precision of health checks during one of the most common operational tasks: rolling updates of worker nodes.
June 25, 2025
Gardener's dependency-watchdog is a crucial component for ensuring cluster stability. During infrastructure-level outages where worker nodes cannot communicate with the control plane, it activates a "meltdown protection" mechanism. This involves scaling down key control plane components like the machine-controller-manager (MCM), cluster-autoscaler (CA), and...
June 25, 2025
Gardener has introduced a new feature gate, DoNotCopyBackupCredentials , to enhance the security and clarity of how backup credentials for managed seeds are handled. This change moves away from an implicit credential-copying mechanism to a more explicit and secure configuration practice.
June 25, 2025
Gardener is enhancing its capabilities to support autonomous Shoot clusters, a model where the control plane runs on dedicated nodes within the cluster itself rather than on a separate Seed cluster. This approach is ideal for edge, air-gapped, or self-hosted Gardener environments. A new command-line tool, gardenadm , is being developed to streamline the crea...
June 18, 2025
Gardener's extension mechanism has been enhanced with two new fields in the ControllerRegistration and operatorv1alpha1.Extension APIs, offering operators more granular control and improved safety when managing extensions. These changes, detailed in PR #11982 , introduce autoEnable and clusterCompatibility for resources of kind: Extension .
June 18, 2025
Gardener continuously evolves to optimize performance and reliability. A recent improvement focuses on how internal control plane components communicate with kube-apiserver instances, introducing cluster-internal Layer 7 (L7) load balancing to ensure better resource distribution and system stability.
June 18, 2025
Gardener is advancing its observability capabilities by integrating OpenTelemetry, starting with log collection and processing. This strategic move, outlined in GEP-34: OpenTelemetry Operator And Collectors , lays the groundwork for a more standardized, flexible, and powerful observability framework in line with Gardener's Observability 2.0 vision .
June 17, 2025
The latest "Hack The Garden" event, held in June 2025 at Schlosshof in Schelklingen , brought together members of the Gardener community for an intensive week of collaboration, coding, and problem-solving. The hackathon focused on a wide array of topics aimed at enhancing Gardener's capabilities, modernizing its stack, and improving user experience. You can...
May 21, 2025
Gardener has recently refined how it determines the readiness of kube-proxy components within managed Kubernetes clusters. This adjustment leads to more accurate system health reporting, especially during node scale-down operations orchestrated by cluster-autoscaler .
May 21, 2025
Gardener continues to enhance its operational capabilities, and a recent improvement introduces a much-requested feature for managing gardenlets: the ability to forcefully trigger their redeployment. This provides operators with greater control and a streamlined recovery path for specific scenarios.
May 21, 2025
Gardener continues to enhance its gardenadm tool, simplifying the management of autonomous Shoot clusters. Recently, new functionalities have been introduced to streamline the process of adding worker nodes to these clusters: the gardenadm token command suite and the corresponding gardenadm join command. These additions offer a more convenient and Kubernetes...
May 19, 2025
Gardener is continually evolving to offer greater flexibility and efficiency in managing Kubernetes clusters. A significant enhancement has been introduced that addresses a common networking challenge: the requirement for completely disjoint network CIDR blocks between a shoot cluster and its seed cluster. Now, Gardener allows for IPv4 network overlap in spe...
May 19, 2025
Gardener is committed to providing efficient and flexible Kubernetes cluster management. Traditionally, updates to worker pool configurations, such as machine image or Kubernetes minor version changes, trigger a rolling update. This process involves replacing existing nodes with new ones, which is a robust approach for many scenarios. However, for environmen...
May 19, 2025
Gardener Dashboard version 1.80 introduces several significant enhancements aimed at improving user experience, credentials management, and overall operational efficiency. These updates bring more clarity to credential handling, a smoother experience for managing large numbers of clusters, and a move towards a more reactive interface.
May 12, 2025
The Kubernetes ecosystem is dynamic, offering a wealth of tools to manage the complexities of modern cloud-native applications. For enterprises seeking to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters efficiently, securely, and at scale, a robust and comprehensive solution is paramount. Gardener, born from years of managing tens of thousands of clusters efficient...
April 17, 2025
As organizations embrace Kubernetes for managing containerized applications at scale, the underlying infrastructure costs, particularly for compute resources, become a critical factor. Gardener, the open-source Kubernetes management platform, empowers organizations like SAP, STACKIT, T-Systems, and others (see adopters ) to operate tens of thousands of Kuber...
March 18, 2025
The open-source project Gardener is set to showcase its cutting-edge Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) capabilities at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London.
December 8, 2024
🌐 IPv6 Support on IronCore : The team successfully created dual-stack shoot clusters on IronCore, although LoadBalancer services for IPv6 traffic still need some work. 🔁 Version Classification Lifecycle in CloudProfile : A Gardener Enhancement Proposal (GEP) was developed to predefine the timestamps for Kubernetes or machine image version classifications i...
November 9, 2024
We're thrilled to announce the launch of our new Gardener demo environment ! This interactive playground is designed to provide you with a hands-on experience of Gardener, our open-source project that offers a Kubernetes-based solution for managing Kubernetes clusters across various cloud providers uniformly.
November 1, 2024
Many innovative observability and application performance management (APM) products and services were released over the last few years. They often adopt or enhance concepts that Prometheus invented more than a decade ago. However, Prometheus, as an open-source project, has never lost its importance in this fast-moving industry and is the core of Gardener's m...
October 24, 2024
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA is just around the corner, taking place this year amidst the stunning backdrop of the Rocky Mountains in Salt Lake City, Utah.
May 21, 2024
🗃️ OCI Helm Release Reference for ControllerDeployment : The Hackathon introduced the core.gardener.cloud/v1 API, which supports OCI repository-based Helm chart references. This innovation reduces operational complexity and enables reusability for other scenarios. 👨🏼💻 Local gardener-operator Development Setup with gardenlet : A new Skaffold configuratio...
April 22, 2024
In Kubernetes, on every Node the container runtime daemon pulls the container images that are configured in the Pods' specifications running on the corresponding Node. Although these container images are cached on the Node's file system after the initial pull operation, there are imperfections with this setup.
April 18, 2024
With the rising popularity of WebAssembly (WASM) and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) comes a variety of integration possibilities. WASM is now not only suitable for the browser, but can be also utilized for running workloads on the server. In this post we will explore how you can get started writing serverless applications powered by SpinKube on a Garden...
April 5, 2024
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024, recently held in Paris, was a testament to the robustness of the open-source community and its pivotal role in driving advancements in AI and cloud-native technologies. With a record attendance of over +12,000 participants, the conference underscored the ubiquity of cloud-native architectures and the business opportuniti...
March 27, 2023
Developing highly available workload that can tolerate a zone outage is no trivial task. In this blog, we will explore various recommendations to get closer to that goal. While many recommendations are general enough, the examples are specific in how to achieve this in a Gardener -managed cluster and where/how to tweak the different control plane components....
October 20, 2022
This community call was led by Pawel Palucki and Alexander D. Kanevskiy .
October 6, 2022
This community call was led by Raymond de Jong .
June 17, 2022
This community call was led by Jens Schneider and Lothar Gesslein.
March 23, 2022
This community call was led by Tim Ebert and Rafael Franzke .
February 17, 2022
This community call was led by Holger Kosser , Lukas Gross and Peter Sutter .
September 12, 2021
The cloud-native landscape is constantly evolving, bringing immense benefits in agility and scale. However, with this evolution comes a complex and ever-changing threat landscape. Recently, a significant vulnerability was reported by Unit 42 concerning Azure Container Instances (ACI) , a service designed to run containers in a multi-tenant environment. This...
February 1, 2021
Happy New Year Gardeners! As we greet 2021, we also celebrate Gardener’s third anniversary. Gardener was born with its first open source commit on 10.1.2018 (its inception within SAP was of course some 9 months earlier):
January 25, 2021
Kubernetes is a cloud-native enabler built around the principles for a resilient, manageable, observable, highly automated, loosely coupled system. We know that Kubernetes is infrastructure agnostic with the help of a provider specific Cloud Controller Manager . But Kubernetes has explicitly externalized the management of the nodes. Once they appear - correc...
December 3, 2020
STACKIT is a digital brand of Europe’s biggest retailer, the Schwarz Group, which consists of Lidl, Kaufland, as well as production and recycling companies. Following the industry trend, the Schwarz Group is in the process of a digital transformation. STACKIT enables this transformation by helping to modernize the internal IT of the company branches.
November 23, 2020
Dear community, we're happy to announce a new minor release of Gardener, in fact, the 16th in 2020! v1.13 came out just today after a couple of weeks of code improvements and feature implementations. As usual, this blog post provides brief summaries for the most notable changes that we introduce with this version. Behind the scenes (and not explicitly highli...
November 20, 2020
NOTE
November 4, 2020
Two months after our last Gardener release update, we are happy again to present release v1.11 and v1.12 in this blog post. Control plane migration, load balancer consolidation, and new security features are just a few topics we progressed with. As always, a detailed list of features, improvements, and bug fixes can be found in the release notes of each rele...
October 19, 2020
The Gardener team is happy to announce that Gardener now offers support for an additional, often requested, infrastructure/virtualization technology, namely KubeVirt ! Gardener can now provide Kubernetes-conformant clusters using KubeVirt managed Virtual Machines in the environment of your choice. This integration has been tested and works with any qualified...
October 19, 2020
Do you want to understand how Gardener creates and updates Kubernetes clusters (Shoots)? Well, it's complicated, but if you are not afraid of large diagrams and are a visual learner like me, this might be useful to you.
September 11, 2020
Summer holidays aren't over yet, still, the Gardener community was able to release two new minor versions in the past weeks. Despite being limited in capacity these days, we were able to reach some major milestones, like adding Kubernetes v1.19 support and the long-delayed automated gardenlet certificate rotation. Whilst we continue to work on topics related...
August 6, 2020
Even if we are in the midst of the summer holidays, a new Gardener release came out yesterday: v1.8.0! It's main themes are the large change of our logging stack to Loki (which was already explained in detail on a blog post on grafana.com ), more configuration options to optimize the utilization of a shoot, node-local DNS, new project roles, and significant...
May 11, 2020
The Gardener project website just received a serious facelift. Here are some of the highlights:
June 11, 2019
Feature flags are used to change the behavior of a program at runtime without forcing a restart.
June 11, 2019
The kubectl command-line tool uses kubeconfig files to find the information it needs in order to choose a cluster and communicate with its API server.
May 24, 2019
The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe buzz might be settling, but the energy from our deep dive session with the incredible folks at SIG Cluster API is still palpable! We, from the Gardener team, were absolutely thrilled to share the stage and explore the powerful, declarative world of Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management.
December 25, 2018
For a team event during the Christmas season we decided to completely reinterpret the topic cookies . 😃
December 22, 2018
...they mess up the figure.
July 11, 2018
You want to experiment with Kubernetes or set up a customer scenario, but don't want to run the cluster 24 / 7 due to cost reasons?
June 11, 2018
Running as Root User ​ Whenever possible, do not run containers as root users. One could be tempted to say that in Kubernetes, the node and pods are well separated, however, the host and the container share the same kernel. If the container is compromised, a root user can damage the underlying node. Instead of running a root user, use RUN grou...
June 11, 2018
In summer 2018, the Gardener project team asked Kinvolk to execute several penetration tests in its role as a third-party contractor. The goal of this ongoing work is to increase the security of all Gardener stakeholders in the open source community. Following the Gardener architecture, the control plane of a Gardener managed shoot cluster resides in the cor...
June 11, 2018
Microservices tend to use smaller runtimes but you can use what you have today - and this can be a problem in Kubernetes .
June 11, 2018
The Gardener project team has analyzed the impact of the Gardener CVE-2018-2475 and the Kubernetes CVE-2018-1002105 on the Gardener Community Setup. Following some recommendations it is possible to mitigate both vulnerabilities.
June 11, 2018
The Kubernetes client command, kubectl, is included and configured to connect to the local Kubernetes server. If you have kubectl already installed and pointing to some other environment, such as minikube or a GKE cluster, be sure to change the context so that kubectl is pointing to docker-for-desktop. Read more on Docker.com .
June 11, 2018
...or DENY all traffic from other namespaces
June 11, 2018
Should I use:
June 11, 2018
The efs-provisioner allows you to mount EFS storage as PersistentVolumes in Kubernetes. It consists of a container that has access to an AWS EFS resource. The container reads a configmap containing the EFS filesystem ID, the AWS region and the name identifying the efs-provisioner. This name will be used later when you create a storage class.
June 11, 2018
The storage is definitely the most complex and important part of an application setup. Once this part is completed, one of the most problematic parts could be solved.
June 11, 2018
One thing that always bothered me was that I couldn't get the logs of several pods at once with kubectl . A simple tail -f <path-to-logfile> isn't possible. Certainly, you can use kubectl logs -f <pod-id> , but it doesn't help if you want to monitor more than one pod at a time.
