* Clean up the kube-proxy container image by removing unnecessary packages and files. ([#42090](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/42090), [@timstclair](https://github.com/timstclair))
* Better compat with very old iptables (e.g. CentOS 6) ([#37594](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/37594), [@thockin](https://github.com/thockin))

### Scheduler

    * Notes on LB name:
    * to ensure backword and forward compat:
    * - SingleStack -v4 (pre v1.16) => BackendPool name == clusterName
    * - SingleStack -v6 => BackendPool name == clusterName (all cluster bootstrap uses this name)
    * DualStack:

- Enabled compact snapshots in the watch cache based on `etcd` compaction events. ([#132876](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132876), [@serathius](https://github.com/serathius)) [SIG API Machinery and Etcd]

   ([#122292](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122292), [@sanposhiho](https://github.com/sanposhiho))
- JWTs used in service account and OIDC authentication are now strictly parsed to confirm that they use compact serialization. Other encodings were not previously accepted, but would result in different unspecific errors. ([#123540](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/123540), [@enj](https://github.com/enj))

storage, etcd, has a new release 3.5.0 and the community embraced it. The new release comes with improvements to the Security, performance, monitoring and developer experience. There are numerous bug fixes to lease objects causing memory leaks, and compact operation causing deadlocks and more. A couple of new features are also introduced like the migration to structured logging and build in log rotation. The release comes with a detailed future roadmap to implement a solution to traffic overload. A...