When adding links which point to resources within git repositories, like
  KEPs or supporting documentation, please reference a specific commit and avoid
  linking directly to the master branch. This ensures that links reference a
  specific point in time, rather than a document that may change over time.
  

* GCE: Fix for internal load balancer management resulting in backend services with outdated instance group links. ([#62887](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/62887), [@nicksardo](https://github.com/nicksardo))

* GCE: Fix for internal load balancer management resulting in backend services with outdated instance group links. ([#62887](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/62887), [@nicksardo](https://github.com/nicksardo))

* fix kubelet fail to delete orphaned pod directory when the kubelet's pods directory (default is "/var/lib/kubelet/pods") symbolically links to another disk device's directory ([#79094](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/79094), [@gaorong](https://github.com/gaorong))

serve current metrics values. It provides the Metrics API that is used by `kubectl top`, and horizontal pod autoscaler. Note that it doesn't include some features of Heapster, such as short term metrics for graphs in kube-dashboard and dedicated push sinks, which proved hard to maintain and scale. Clusters using Heapster for transferring metrics into long-term storage should consider using their metric solution's native Kubernetes support, if present, or should consider alternative solutions. ([#623...

* Fixes segmentation fault issue with Protobuf library when log entries are deeply nested. ([#77224](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/77224), [@qingling128](https://github.com/qingling128))
* Clean links handling in cp's tar code ([#76788](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/76788), [@soltysh](https://github.com/soltysh))

## Changelog since v1.8.11

### Other notable changes

* GCE: Fix for internal load balancer management resulting in backend services with outdated instance group links. ([#62887](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/62887), [@nicksardo](https://github.com/nicksardo))

  
  When adding links which point to resources within git repositories, like
  KEPs or supporting documentation, please reference a specific commit and avoid
  linking directly to the master branch. This ensures that links reference a
  specific point in time, rather than a document that may change over time.
  

  
  When adding links which point to resources within git repositories, like
  KEPs or supporting documentation, please reference a specific commit and avoid
  linking directly to the master branch. This ensures that links reference a
  specific point in time, rather than a document that may change over time.
  

  - `kubectl convert`, deprecated since v1.14, will be removed in v1.17.
  - The `--export` flag for the `kubectl get` command, deprecated since v1.14, will be removed in v1.18.
  - `kubectl cp` no longer supports copying symbolic links from containers; to support this use case, see `kubectl exec --help` for examples using `tar` directly ([#82143](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/82143), [@soltysh](https://github.com/soltysh))