* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@and...

* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@and...

      - [Application Deployment](#application-deployment-1)
      - [Cluster Autoscaling](#cluster-autoscaling)
      - [Cloud Provider Enhancement](#cloud-provider-enhancement)
      - [Cluster Provisioning](#cluster-provisioning)
      - [Cluster federation](#cluster-federation-1)
      - [Credential provider](#credential-provider)

### OpenStack

SIG-OpenStack updated the OpenStack provider to use newer APIs, consolidated community code into one repository, engaged with the Cloud Provider Working Group to have a consistent plan for moving provider code into individual repositories, improved testing of provider code, and strengthened ties with the OpenStack developer community.

### API-machinery

- Fix: set nil cache entry based on old cache ([#87593](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87593), [@aramase](https://github.com/aramase)) [SIG Cloud Provider]

### SIG Cloud Provider

- Fix: do not delete the lb that does not exist (#105777, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: ignore not a VMSS error for VMAS nodes in EnsureBackendPoolDeleted. (#105185, @ialidzhikov) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: leave the probe path empty for TCP probes (#105253, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]

- The in-tree cloud provider for vSphere has been deprecated and removed. Users are advised to utilize the external cloud provider and CSI driver available at https://github.com/kubernetes/cloud-provider-vsphere. ([#122937](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122937), [@dims](https://github.com/dims))...

([#64706](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/64706), [@liztio](https://github.com/liztio))

- Introduce a feature gate `DisableCloudProviders` allowing to disable cloud-provider initialization in KAPI, KCM and kubelet.