* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@and...

* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@and...

### OpenStack

SIG-OpenStack updated the OpenStack provider to use newer APIs, consolidated community code into one repository, engaged with the Cloud Provider Working Group to have a consistent plan for moving provider code into individual repositories, improved testing of provider code, and strengthened ties with the OpenStack developer community.

### API-machinery

- Fix: set nil cache entry based on old cache ([#87593](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87593), [@aramase](https://github.com/aramase)) [SIG Cloud Provider]

      - [Application Deployment](#application-deployment-1)
      - [Cluster Autoscaling](#cluster-autoscaling)
      - [Cloud Provider Enhancement](#cloud-provider-enhancement)
      - [Cluster Provisioning](#cluster-provisioning)
      - [Cluster federation](#cluster-federation-1)
      - [Credential provider](#credential-provider)

### SIG Cloud Provider

- Fix: do not delete the lb that does not exist (#105777, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: ignore not a VMSS error for VMAS nodes in EnsureBackendPoolDeleted. (#105185, @ialidzhikov) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: leave the probe path empty for TCP probes (#105253, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]

- Introduce a feature gate `DisableCloudProviders` allowing to disable cloud-provider initialization in KAPI, KCM and kubelet.

* The AWS credential provider can now obtain ECR credentials even without the AWS cloud provider or being on an EC2 instance. Additionally, AWS credential provider caching has been improved to honor the ECR credential timeout. ([#75587](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/75587), [@tiffanyfay](https://github.com/tiffanyfay))

- The node annotation alpha.kubernetes.io/provided-node-ip is no longer set ONLY when `--cloud-provider=external`.  Now, it is set on kubelet startup if the `--cloud-provider` flag is set at all, including the deprecated in-tree providers. ([#109794](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109794), [@mdbooth](https://github.com/mdbooth)) [SIG Network and Node]