- `kubeadm`: will now allow deploying a kubelet that is 3 versions older than the version of `kubeadm` (N-3). This aligns with the recent change made by SIG Architecture that extends the support skew between the control plane and kubelets. Tolerate this new kubelet skew for the commands...

- kubeadm still generates RSA keys when deploying a node, but also accepts ECDSA
keys if they already exist in the directory specified in the `--cert-dir` option. ([#76390](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/76390), [@rojkov](https://github.com/rojkov))

* kubeadm: Remove hard-coded default version when fetching stable version from the web fails. Fixes [kubeadm 1.6.1 deploying 1.6.0 control plane](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubeadm/issues/224). ([#43999](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/43999), [@mikedanese](https://github.com/mikedanese))

    * 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

[SIG Autoscaling]: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-autoscaling

### SIG Cluster Lifecycle

[SIG Cluster Lifecycle][] is responsible for the user experience of deploying,
upgrading, and deleting clusters.

For the 1.8 release, SIG Cluster Lifecycle continued to focus on expanding the
capabilities of kubeadm, which is both a user-facing tool to manage clusters

For the 1.9 release, SIG Storage made Kubernetes more pluggable and modular by introducing an alpha implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI). CSI will make installing new volume plugins as easy as deploying a pod, and enable third-party storage providers to develop their plugins without the need to add code to the core Kubernetes codebase.

    * 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.

- Client-go: improved allocation behavior of the delaying workqueue when handling objects with far-future ready times. ([#83945](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/83945), [@barkbay](https://github.com/barkbay))

- If a serving certificate’s param specifies a name that is an IP for an SNI certificate, it will have priority for replying to server connections. ([#85308](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/85308), [@deads2k](https://github.com/deads2k)) [SIG API Machinery]