### (No, really, you MUST read this before you upgrade)

### Misc

- Failed pods associated with a job with `parallelism = 1` are recreated by the job controller honoring exponential backoff delay again. However, for jobs with `parallelism > 1`, pods might be created without exponential backoff delay. ([#115020](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115020), [@nikhita](https://github.com/nikhita)) [SIG Apps]

- Fixed computing backoff delay when using Job pod failure policy, by including in the backoff delay calculation pod failures ignored from the backoffLimit counter. ([#119434](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119434), [@mimowo](https://github.com/mimowo))

- Added a delay to node updates after kubelet startup. A random offset, based on the configured `nodeStatusReportFrequency`, helped distribute traffic and load from node status updates more evenly over time. The initial status update could occur up to 50% earlier...

- Fix computing backoff delay when using Job pod failure policy, by including in the backoff delay calculation pod failures ignored from the backoffLimit counter.
  
  Also, compute the backoff delay more accurately for deleted pods. ([#119466](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/119466), [@mimowo](https://github.com/mimowo)) [SIG Apps]

- Kube-controller-manager: the `horizontal-pod-autoscaler-upscale-delay` and `horizontal-pod-autoscaler-downscale-delay` flags have been removed (deprecated and non-functional since v1.12). ([#124948](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/124948), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG API Machinery, Apps and Autoscaling]

- Fix instance not found issues when an Azure Node is recreated in a short time ([#93316](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/93316), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer)) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: initial delay in mounting azure disk & file ([#93052](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/93052), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx)) [SIG Cloud Provider and Storage]

* CRI: `kubectl logs -f` now stops following when container stops, as it did pre-CRI. ([#44406](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44406), [@Random-Liu](https://github.com/Random-Liu))
* Azure cloudprovider: Reduce the polling delay for all azure clients to 5 seconds. This should speed up some operations at the cost of some additional quota. ([#43699](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/43699), [@colemickens](https://github.com/colemickens))

- Failed pods associated with a job with `parallelism = 1` are recreated by the job controller honoring exponential backoff delay again. However, for jobs with `parallelism > 1`, pods might be created without exponential backoff delay. ([#115022](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115022), [@nikhita](https://github.com/nikhita)) [SIG Apps]