#### New Deprecations

* As a reminder, etcd2 as a backend is deprecated and support will be removed in Kubernetes 1.13. Please ensure that your clusters are upgraded to etcd3 as soon as possible.

### SIG CLI

* kubectl port-forward now allows using resource name (e.g., deployment/www) to select a matching pod, as well as the use of --pod-running-timeout to wait until at least one pod is running. ([#59705](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59705), [@phsiao](https://github.com/phsiao))

Cluster Lifecycle

SIG Cluster Lifecycle has been focusing on improving kubeadm in order to bring it to GA in a future release, as well as developing the [Cluster API](https://github.com/kubernetes/kube-deploy/tree/master/cluster-api). For kubeadm, most new features, such as support for CoreDNS, IPv6 and Dynamic Kubelet Configuration, have gone in as alpha features. We expect to graduate these features to beta and beyond in the next release. The initial Cluster API spec and GCE sample implementation...

### CSI Health Monitoring

The CSI health monitoring feature is being released as a second Alpha in Kubernetes 1.21. This feature enables CSI Drivers to share abnormal volume conditions from the underlying storage systems with Kubernetes so that they can be reported as events on PVCs or Pods. This feature serves as a stepping stone towards programmatic detection and resolution of individual volume health issues by Kubernetes.

- Enable external plugins can be used as subcommands for kubectl create command if subcommand does not exist as builtin only when KUBECTL_ENABLE_CMD_SHADOW environment variable is exported. ([#116293](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116293), [@ardaguclu](https://github.com/ardaguclu))

- SourcesReady provides the readiness of kubelet configuration sources such as apiserver update readiness. ([#81344](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81344), [@zouyee](https://github.com/zouyee))

* Requests with the query parameter `?watch=` are treated by the API server as a request to watch, but authorization and metrics were not correctly identifying those as watch requests, instead grouping them as list calls. ([#48583](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/48583), [@smarterclayton](https://github.com/smarterclayton))

### SIG-ibmcloud

As a newly created SIG, the SIG-ibmcloud has mainly focused on SIG set up, sharing IBM Clouds ongoing Kubernetes work like scalability tests, Kubernetes upgrade strategy etc. with the SIG members and start working on processes to move cloud provider code to a public GitHub repo.

### SIG-instrumentation

No feature work, but a large refactoring of metrics-server as well as a number of bug fixes.

### SIG-node

- The apiserver debug endpoint `/debug/api_priority_and_fairness/dump_requests` has been extended to dump executing requests as well as queued ones.  A column for StartTime has been added to the returned table, with the queued requests having a StartTime of "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z".  The executing requests have a RequestIndexInQueue of -1, and the QueueIndex is also -1 for priority...