Troubleshoot workloads that crash on startup by creating a copy of the pod that uses a different container image or command.
Troubleshoot distroless containers by adding a new container with debugging tools, either in a new copy of the pod or using an ephemeral container. (Ephemeral containers are an alpha feature that are not enabled by default.)

- Endpoints resources created by the Endpoints controller now have a label indicating this.
  (Users creating Endpoints by hand _can_ also add this label themselves, but they ought
  to switch to creating EndpointSlices rather than Endpoints anyway.) ([#130564](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/130564), [@danwinship](https://github.com/danwinship)) [SIG Apps and Network]

    * the loop to correctly handle acquiring the write lock with deferred
    * unlock to run at that function's completion, following the normal
    * golang lock/deferred-unlock pattern.
* Avoid creating new controller revisions for statefulsets when cache is stale ([#67039](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/67039), [@mortent](https://github.com/mortent))

- Fixed a bug in the Job controller that could result in creating unnecessary Pods for Jobs already marked as finished (either successful or failed). ([#130333](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/130333), [@kmala](https://github.com/kmala)) [SIG Apps and Testing]

* Support configuring the Azure load balancer idle connection timeout for services ([#66045](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66045), [@cpuguy83](https://github.com/cpuguy83))
* Let service controller retry creating load balancer when persistUpdate failed due to conflict. ([#68087](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68087), [@grayluck](https://github.com/grayluck))

### SIG Apps

- The service controller will now retry creating the load balancer when `persistUpdate` fails due to conflict. ([#68087](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68087), [@grayluck](https://github.com/grayluck))

* Automated cherry pick of [#49259](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/49259): update json-patch to fix nil value issue when creating mergepatch ([#59324](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59324), [@yue9944882](https://github.com/yue9944882))

### Other notable changes

* Update kube-dns to 1.14.5 ([#53112](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53112), [@bowei](https://github.com/bowei))
* Fix panic in ControllerManager on GCE when it has a problem with creating external loadbalancer healthcheck ([#52646](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/52646), [@gmarek](https://github.com/gmarek))

## Changelog since v1.31.10

## Changes by Kind

### Bug or Regression

- Fix a bug causing unexpected delay of creating pods for newly created jobs ([#132109](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132109), [@linxiulei](https://github.com/linxiulei)) [SIG Apps and Testing]

- Fix a bug that `--disabled-metrics` doesn't function well. (#106391, @Huang-Wei) [SIG API Machinery, Cluster Lifecycle and Instrumentation]
- Fix a panic in kubectl when creating secrets with an improper output type (#106354, @lauchokyip) [SIG CLI]
- Fix concurrent map access causing panics when logging timed-out API calls. (#106113, @marseel) [SIG API Machinery]