kOps 1.37 beta lands, GCE jobs and Kopeio dropped

The week's most substantial thread was kOps 1.37.0-beta.1, which shipped alongside the removal of Kopeio networking support and its associated test-infra jobs [2][3]. This is a breaking change for any cluster still using Kopeio; expects to migrate to another CNI before upgrading. Additionally, GCE Calico grid jobs for kops 1.34 were dropped from test-infra [1], signaling a narrowing of continuous testing for older kOps versions on GCE.

The Kubernetes release pipeline received a critical fix [4]: the process used to exclude the .git directory from release artifacts, but that exclusion broke builds. The fix strips remote credentials instead of excluding .git, ensuring the repository is fully available during the build while protecting secrets. This resolves the release pipeline issue that had surfaced earlier in the week [ref:26? no, ref:26 not in input]. Also in the release repo, Debian Trixie support was added for debian-base [5], and the Cloud Build timeout was bumped [6] to accommodate longer builds.

On the kOps side, v1.37.0-beta.1 made nodeup.xz the canonical artifact for nodeup, and GCE teardown fixes were merged [ref:29? no, ref:29 not in input]. Volume label normalization for Akamai was also corrected to comply with the API's length and character restrictions [7]. kOps is gating breaking changes for the 1.37 release, aligning with the removal of Kopeio and the CI cleanup.

Elsewhere, node-problem-detector added zswap metrics bytes_used and compression_efficiency [8], and minikube updated its ISO kernel from 6.6.95 to 6.6.152 [9]. Test-infra upgraded Python to 3.13 for kettle [10] and added a Kueue stage plugin [11]. The website continued syncing Chinese translations [12][13][14] and updated the v1.37 release announcement with grammar fixes [15].