Kubernetes expires every fourteen months, and you cannot skip versions
On 27 October 2026 the Kubernetes 1.34 branch stops receiving patches, and that date has been published since the version shipped. The project supports each branch for "roughly fourteen (14) months" — twelve months plus two in maintenance mode — and only the three most recent minor versions. Subtract the published end-of-life dates and you get the number that matters: a version expires every four months. What maintenance mode actually means, why the control plane cannot skip versions on upgrade, how much slack the nodes have, and why that slack makes a cluster look healthy while it drifts.