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API compatibility

cert-manager aims to abide by the same API compatibility policy as upstream Kubernetes APIs, see Kubernetes Deprecation Policy. The main purpose of this is to ensure a smooth upgrade and downgrade experience for users, i.e to make sure that users' cert-manager custom resources keep functioning as before after an upgrade or downgrade of cert-manager.

In some cases, we may need to require users to take actions before upgrading or may need to diverge from the API compatibility promise:

  • In cert-manager v1.7 all alpha and beta API versions were removed. The Kubernetes Deprecation policy notes that API removal introduces an issue with objects stored at the removed versions. To fix this, we wrote a custom tool that users could run once to migrate their resources.

  • In general, the main criteria of determining whether a change is acceptable should be user value. For example, in case of a critical bug, a fix that breaks the API compatibility promise by changing the default behavior of an API field might be acceptable. (As of yet, there has not been a need for such a fix).