- Azure cloud provider can now be configured by Kubernetes secrets and a new option `cloudConfigType` has been introduced. Candidate values are `file`, `secret` or `merge` (default is `merge`). Note that the secret is a serialized version of `azure.json` file with key cloud-config. And the secret name is azure-cloud-provider in kube-system namespace. ([#78242](https://github....

- Overall, enable the feature of `PreferNominatedNode` will  improve the performance of scheduling where preemption might frequently happen, but in theory, enable the feature of `PreferNominatedNode`, the pod might not be scheduled to the best candidate node in the cluster. ([#93179](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/93179), [@chendave](https://github.com/chendave)) [SIG Scheduling and Testing]

* New Azure cloud provider option 'cloudProviderBackoffMode' has been added to reduce Azure API retries. Candidate values are: ([#70866](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/70866), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer))
   * default (or empty string): keep same with before.

- When a PreFilterResult filters out certain Nodes, the scheduling framework now categorizes them as rejected via `UnschedulableAndUnresolvable`. Consequently, these nodes are excluded from the candidates for the preemption process. Additionally, this update corrects how the scheduling framework handles the Unschedulable status from PreFilter. Previously, if PreFilter returned `Unschedulable`, it could lead to an unexpected abortion in the preemption...

- External facing API podresources is now available under k8s.io/kubelet/pkg/apis/ ([#92632](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/92632), [@RenaudWasTaken](https://github.com/RenaudWasTaken)) [SIG Node and Testing]
- Fewer candidates are enumerated for preemption to improve performance in large clusters. ([#94814](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/94814), [@adtac](https://github.com/adtac))