- The job controller back-off logic is now decoupled from workqueue. In case of parallelism > 1, if there are multiple new failures in a reconciliation cycle, all the failures are taken into account to compute the back-off. Previously, the back-off kicked in for all types of failures; with this change, only pod failures are taken into account. If the back-off limits exceeds, the job is marked as failed immediately; before this change, the...

- When the go-client reflector relists, the ResourceVersion list option is set to the reflector's latest synced resource version to ensure the reflector does not "go back in time" and reprocess events older than it has already processed. If the server responds with an HTTP 410 (Gone) status code response, the relist falls back to using `resourceVersion=""`. ([#83520](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/83520), [@jpbetz](https://github.com/jpbetz))

stability and performance improvements in the 1.13 release.  A new alpha feature is introduced to improve the mechanism that nodes heartbeat back to the control plane.  The `NodeLease` feature results in the node using a `Lease` resource in the `kube-node-lease` namespace that is renewed periodically.  The `NodeStatus` that was used previously to heartbeat back to the control plane is only updated when it changes.  This reduces load on the control plane for large clusters. The Kubelet plugin registration...

- The fallback behavior of the Downward API's `resourceFieldRef` field was updated to account for pod-level resources: if container-level limits were not set, pod-level limits were now used before falling back to node allocatable resources. ([#132605](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132605), [@toVersus](https://github.com/toVersus)) [SIG Node, Scheduling and Testing]

### Other (Cleanup or Flake)

- Append the image pull error for the pods `status.containerStatuses[*].state.waiting.message` when
  in image pull back-off (`reason` is `ImagePullBackOff`) instead of the generic `Back-off pulling image…` message. ([#127918](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127918), [@saschagrunert](https://github.com/saschagrunert)) [SIG Node and Testing]

- Fix regression introduced in 1.33  - where some Paginated LIST calls are falling back to etcd instead of serving from cache. ([#132337](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132337), [@hakuna-matatah](https://github.com/hakuna-matatah)) [SIG API Machinery]

* fix detach azure disk back off issue which has too big lock in failure retry condition ([#76573](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/76573), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx))

* fix network setup in hack/local-up-cluster.sh (https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/60431) ([#60633](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/60633), [@pohly](https://github.com/pohly))
    * better error diagnostics in hack/local-up-cluster.sh output

## 1.9 Release Notes

## WARNING: etcd backup strongly recommended

Before updating to 1.9, you are strongly recommended to back up your etcd data. Consult the installation procedure you are using (kargo, kops, kube-up, kube-aws, kubeadm etc) for specific advice.