### Bug or Regression

- Avoid GCE API calls when initializing GCE CloudProvider for Kubelets.

* Job controller now respects ControllerRef to avoid fighting over Pods. ([#42176](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/42176), [@enisoc](https://github.com/enisoc))

* CronJob controller now respects ControllerRef to avoid fighting with other controllers. ([#42177](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/42177), [@enisoc](https://github.com/enisoc))

### Bug or Regression

- Avoid GCE API calls when initializing GCE CloudProvider for Kubelets.

  
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- Avoid caching the Azure VMSS instances whose network profile is nil ([#100948](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/100948), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer)) [SIG Cloud Provider]

Anyway, the cluster should get back to the proper size after 10 min.

### Deployment

    * Default value for expendable pod priority cutoff in GCP deployment of Cluster Autoscaler changed from 0 to -10.
    * action required: users deploying workloads with priority lower than 0 may want to use priority lower than -10 to avoid triggering scale-up.

### Other notable changes

* Metadata Agent Improvements ([#66485](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66485), [@bmoyles0117](https://github.com/bmoyles0117))

- DaemonSet controller is now using backoff algorithm to avoid hot loops fighting with kubelet on pod recreation when a particular DaemonSet is misconfigured. ([#65309](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/65309), [@tnozicka](https://github.com/tnozicka))

setting the `UnauthenticatedHTTP2DOSMitigation` feature gate to `true` (it is disabled by default). An API server fronted by an L7 load balancer that already mitigates these http/2 attacks may choose not to enable the kube-apiserver mitigation to avoid disrupting load balancer → kube-apiserver connections if http/2 requests from multiple clients share the same backend connection. An API server on a private network may choose not to enable the kube-apiserver mitigation to prevent performance regressions...

* Fix metrics API group name in audit configuration ([#53493](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53493), [@piosz](https://github.com/piosz))
* Use separate client for leader election in scheduler to avoid starving leader election by regular scheduler operations. ([#53793](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53793), [@wojtek-t](https://github.com/wojtek-t))