</li>

<li>
Converting a slice of runes to a string type yields
a string that is the concatenation of the individual rune values
converted to strings.

<pre>
string([]rune{0x767d, 0x9d6c, 0x7fd4})   // "\u767d\u9d6c\u7fd4" == "白鵬翔"
string([]rune{})                         // ""
string([]rune(nil))                      // ""

type runes []rune

- Exited kube-proxy when configuration file changes ([#59176](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59176), [@dixudx](https://github.com/dixudx))
- kube-addon-manager was updated to v9.0, and now uses kubectl v1.13.2 and prunes workload resources via the apps/v1 API ([#72978](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/72978), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

*   Azure NSG rules are now restricted so that external access is allowed only to the load balancer IP. ([#54177](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/54177),[ @itowlson](https://github.com/itowlson))

- Resolves issue with `/readyz` and `/livez` not including etcd and kms health checks ([#82713](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/82713), [@logicalhan](https://github.com/logicalhan))
- Fixes regression in logging spurious stack traces when proxied connections are closed by the backend ([#82588](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/82588), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

- `Kubelet` no longer creates certain legacy iptables rules by default.
  It is possible that this will cause problems with some third-party components
  that improperly depended on those rules. If this affects you, you can run

- Decoupled `TaintManager` from `NodeLifeCycleController` (KEP-3902). ([#119208](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119208), [@atosatto](https://github.com/atosatto))
- Enabled traces for KMSv2 encrypt/decrypt operations. ([#121095](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121095), [@aramase](https://github.com/aramase))

    * The vSphere cloud provider has a cleanup function with a loop,
    * inside of which a write lock was intended to prevent races against
    * VM creation, but the usage of the sync.RWMutex type is incorrect,
    * plus is placed in a defer call so the locking is effectively
    * nonexistent.  This patch adds an anonymous function call inside

- In "large" clusters, kube-proxy in iptables mode will now sometimes
  leave unused rules in iptables for a while (up to `--iptables-sync-period`)
  before deleting them. This improves performance by not requiring it to
  check for stale rules on every sync. (In smaller clusters, it will still
  remove unused rules immediately once they are no longer used.)

- CEL regex patterns in x-kubernetes-valiation rules are compiled when CRDs are created/updated if the pattern is provided as a string constant in the expression. Any regex compile errors are reported as a CRD create/update validation error. ([#108617](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108617), [@jpbetz](https://github.com/jpbetz))

### Other notable changes

* Prevent AWS Network Load Balancer security groups ingress rules to be deleted by ensuring target groups are tagged. ([#73594](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/73594), [@masterzen](https://github.com/masterzen))
* Allow disable outbound SNAT when Azure standard load balancer is used together with outbound rules.  ([#75282](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/75282), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer))