Kubernetes is renowned for its robust orchestration of containerized applications, but as clusters grow, the demands on the control plane can become a bottleneck. A key challenge has been ensuring strongly consistent reads from the etcd datastore, requiring resource-intensive quorum reads. Today, the Kubernetes community is excited to announce a major improvement: consistent reads from cache, graduating to Beta in Kubernetes v1.31. Why consistent reads matter Consistent reads are essential for ensuring that Kubernetes components have an accurate view of the latest cluster state.