- The synthetic "Bookmark" event for the watch stream requests will now include a new annotation: `kubernetes.io/initial-events-list-blueprint`. THe annotation contains an empty, versioned list that is encoded in the requested format (such as protobuf, JSON, or CBOR), then base64-encoded and stored as a string. ([#127587](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127587), [@p0lyn0mial](https://github.com/p0lyn0mial)) [SIG API Machinery]

endpoints passed in the `ClusterConfiguration` that have Unicode characters are no longer IDNA encoded (converted to Punycode). They are now just URL encoded as per Go's implementation of RFC-3986, have duplicate "/" removed from the URL paths, and passed like that directly to the `kube-apiserver` `--etcd-servers` flag. If you have etcd endpoints that have Unicode characters, it is advisable to encode them in advance with tooling that is fully IDNA compliant. If you don't do that, the Go standard...

    <glob pattern="*.p7c"/>
  </mime-type>

  <mime-type type="application/pkcs7-signature">
    <glob pattern="*.p7s"/>
    <magic priority="50">
      <!-- PEM encoded -->
      <match value="-----BEGIN PKCS7" type="string" offset="0"/>
      <!-- DER encoded, sequence+length, object=pkcs7-signedData -->
      <match value="0x3080" offset="0">
         <match value="0x06092a864886f70d0107FFa0" type="string"

* Websocket requests may now authenticate to the API server by passing a bearer token in a websocket subprotocol of the form `base64url.bearer.authorization.k8s.io.<base64url-encoded-bearer-token>`. ([#47740](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/47740), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

- '`kubeadm`: added validation to verify that the `CertificateKey` is a valid hex
  encoded AES key.' ([#120064](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120064), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu))
- A customizable `OrderedScoreFuncs()` function was introduced. Out-of-tree plugins 

([#64248](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/64248), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer))

### SIG CLI

* You can now use the `base64decode` function in kubectl go templates to decode base64-encoded data, such as `kubectl get secret SECRET -o go-template='{{ .data.KEY | base64decode }}'`. ([#60755](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/60755), [@glb](https://github.com/glb))

the garbage collector, quota, or the namespace controller. The client asks the server to return a `meta.k8s.io/v1 PartialObjectMetadata` object for list, get, delete, watch, and patch operations on both normal APIs and custom resources which can be encoded in protobuf for additional work. If the server does not yet support this API the client will gracefully fall back to JSON and transform the response objects into PartialObjectMetadata. ([#77819](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/77819),...

- Kubernetes will now consume the AWS region list from the AWS SDK instead of a hard-coded list in the cloud provider. ([#75990](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/75990), [@mcrute](https://github.com/mcrute))

* AWS cloud provider: allow to set KubernetesClusterID or KubernetesClusterTag in combination with VPC. ([#42512](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/42512), [@scheeles](https://github.com/scheeles))

- Fix panic in JSON logging format caused by missing Duration encoder ([#101158](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/101158), [@serathius](https://github.com/serathius)) [SIG API Machinery, Cluster Lifecycle and Instrumentation]