We run a 9-node cluster at home (1 control plane + 8 workers, microk8s). One worker has 2x RTX 3090s running vLLM v0.26 with a 27B AWQ model (TP=2, 163840 context) that half our house automation depends on. We run 1.35.6.

v1.37 (Garhwal) dropped yesterday - 67 enhancements, 16 stable, 23 beta, 1 removal. Before we jump two minors, here's what I'm actually watching:

1. Resilient watchcache init is now Stable and locked on. The API server will reject excess list/watch traffic with HTTP 429 + Retry-After instead of letting it pile into etcd. Good change, but it means every custom controller and operator in the cluster now has to handle 429s with backoff. If yours doesn't, you will start seeing post-upgrade failures that look random. Audit the operators first.

2. HPA scale-to-zero is Beta and on by default. It has been around in some form since 1.16 and finally graduated. For a home cluster this is gold - idle workloads can actually cost nothing. But "on by default" is exactly the kind of thing that surprises you at 2am when a cron job can't find its target.

3. The one removal, plus two minors' worth of deprecations. Removals compound across 1.36 and 1.37 - the changelogs are where the real breakage lives, not the headlines.

Plan: workers first, one at a time (drain, upgrade, verify), 24h soak, then the GPU node last with rollback pinned at 1.35.6 - because that's the one node where an upgrade can break something the rest of the house depends on.

Anyone already on 1.37? Did your operators survive the 429 change, and what etcd did you land on?

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2026/08/26/kubernetes-v1-37-release/