<p>How long is a version of Kubernetes (e.g., 1.7.x) supported? How many versions of Kubernetes back are supported for security and bug fixes? Is this documented somewhere?</p>

<p>Note, I've tried to locate this information in the <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/community" rel="nofollow noreferrer">community repo</a>, on slack, on k8s.io, and using search engines. Have not been able to locate anything in writing. In conversations I've been given multiple answers that are not the same.</p>

<p>Matt,</p>

<p>At Kubernetes community, we define 3 types of Kubernetes releases:</p>

<ul>
<li>Major (x.0.0)</li>
<li>Minor (x.x.0)</li>
<li>Patch (x.x.x)</li>
</ul>

<p>At a single point of time, we develop the new "Major"/"Minor" version of Kubernetes (today - Kubernetes 1.9), and we support three existing releases as the "Patch" releases (today - 1.6.x, 1.7.x and 1.8.x).</p>

<p>When Kubernetes 1.9 will be released, and Kubernetes 1.10 development cycle will start, 1.9 will receive a status of "Patch" release (together with v1.8 and v1.7), and 1.6 will be marked as EOL.</p>

<p>The basic information about Kubernetes versioning is defined at the <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/contributors/design-proposals/release/versioning.md" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Versioning design doc</a>.</p>

<p>The project-wide release process is managed by Kubernetes <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SIG-Release</a>, while the releases itself are managed by the release teams (elected at per-release basis). Release teams, together with release timeline of a specific release, are defined at the <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/features/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">kubernetes/features</a> repo, for example, for <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/features/tree/master/release-1.9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Kubernetes 1.9</a>.</p>
