## What’s New (Major Themes)

We’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.16, our third release of 2019! Kubernetes 1.16 consists of 31 enhancements: 8 enhancements moving to stable, 8 enhancements in beta, and 15 enhancements in alpha.

The main themes of this release are:

### Windows support improved

- [Performance dashboards](http://perf-dash.k8s.io/#/?jobname=soak-tests-capz-windows-2019) added support for Windows
- [Unit tests](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/51540) added support for Windows
- [Conformance tests](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108592) added support for Windows

### Increase the Kubernetes support window to one year

As of Kubernetes 1.19, bugfix support via patch releases for a Kubernetes minor release has increased from 9 months to 1 year.

A survey conducted in early 2019 by the working group (WG) Long Term Support (LTS) showed that a significant subset of Kubernetes end-users fail to upgrade within the previous 9-month support period.