GKE drops Identity Service at version 1.37

GKE drops Identity Service at version 1.37

5 October 2026: Google Kubernetes Engine will stop supporting Identity Service for GKE at version 1.37. The add-on, which lets engineers sign in to clusters with a corporate identity provider such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID or an LDAP directory, is deprecated in 1.36 and earlier and has not been offered to Google Cloud organisations created since 1 July 2025. Google's release notes tell teams to disable it and move to Workforce Identity Federation before upgrading.

Not yet independently verified. Single source: Google's own GKE release notes. We will add independent confirmation when we find it. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Workforce Identity Federation is Google's general way of letting users from an outside identity provider reach Google Cloud resources. For a Kubernetes team the move means setting up the federation with the identity provider, carrying over the group mappings that role-based access control depends on, and testing kubectl and CI sign-in on a non-production cluster before switching production.

The trap is the end of support, not the upgrade itself. Google's deprecation page, updated on 22 October 2026, says GKE blocks both automatic and manual upgrades to 1.37 or later for clusters that still use Identity Service for GKE, and keeps automatic upgrades paused until the end of support for the cluster's minor version (the end of extended support on the Extended channel). If the feature is still enabled when that support ends, sign-in workflows fail, so disable it before upgrading. The deprecation applies only to GKE clusters on Google Cloud; the feature in the connect gateway and in Google Distributed Cloud (software only) is not deprecated.

Because the cutoff is a version number rather than a date, nothing visible changes until the upgrade arrives.

Company profile on TrustList: Google Cloud

Related on TrustList:

• Entra lets passkey users change passwords without the old one
• Google Cloud Backup and DR deprecates the legacy appliance management console: new backups end 30 September 2027, restores 31 March 2028

Sources

• Google Kubernetes Engine release notes (5 October 2026), 5 October 2026
• Google Cloud: Identity Service for GKE deprecation, 22 October 2026