Release notes for kOps 1.22 series

⚠ kOps 1.22 has not been released yet! ⚠

This is a document to gather the release notes prior to the release.

Significant changes

New clusters running Kubernetes 1.22 will have AWS EBS CSI driver enabled by default.

Support for Kubernetes versions 1.15 and 1.16 has been removed.
The legacy location for downloads s3://https://kubeupv2.s3.amazonaws.com/kops/ has been deprecated and will not be used for new releases. The new canonical downloads location is https://artifacts.k8s.io/binaries/kops/.

Support for Kubernetes version 1.17 is deprecated and will be removed in kOps 1.23.
Support for Kubernetes version 1.18 is deprecated and will be removed in kOps 1.24.
The manifest based metrics server addon has been deprecated in favour of a configurable addon.
The manifest based cluster autoscaler addon has been deprecated in favour of a configurable addon.
The node-role.kubernetes.io/master and kubernetes.io/role labels are deprecated and might be removed from control plane nodes in kOps 1.23.
Due to lack of maintainers, the Aliyun/Alibaba Cloud support has been deprecated. The current implementation will be left as-is until the implementation needs updates or otherwise becomes incompatible. At that point, it will be removed. We very much welcome anyone willing to contribute to this cloud provider.

It is no longer necessary to set AWS_SDK_LOAD_CONFIG=1 in the environment when using AWS assumed roles with the kops CLI.