### Bug or Regression

- An inefficient lock in EndpointSlice controller metrics cache has been reworked. Network programming latency may be significantly reduced in certain scenarios, especially in clusters with a large number of Services. ([#107168](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/107168), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Apps and Network]

  don't match the node affinity/selector. This may lead to unschedulable pods if you previously had pods
  matching the spreading selector on those excluded nodes (not matching the node affinity/selector),
  especially when the `topologyKey` is not node-level. Revisit the node affinity and/or pod selector in the

deleted pods may fail to terminate until the kubelet is restarted when the container runtime returns an error during termination. We have strengthened testing for runtime failures and now perform a more rigorous reconciliation to ensure static pods (especially those that use fixed UIDs) are restarted.  As a side effect of these changes static pods will be restarted with lower latency than before (2s vs 4s, on average) and rapid updates to pod configuration should take effect sooner.
  
  A...

- In clusters where the DryRun feature is enabled, dry-run requests will go through the normal admission chain. Because of this, ImagePolicyWebhook authors should especially make sure that their webhooks do not rely on side effects. ([#66391](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66391), [@jennybuckley](https://github.com/jennybuckley))

- Kubernetes will try to acquire the iptables lock every 100 msec during 5 seconds instead of every second. This is especially useful for environments using kube-proxy in iptables mode with a high churn rate of services. ([#85771](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/85771), [@aojea](https://github.com/aojea)) [SIG Network]

  to fetch the OpenAPI may be slower. ([#118808](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118808), [@Jefftree](https://github.com/Jefftree))
- Shrank the `OpenAPI v2` spec by more than 50%, especially for less CPU resource consumption. ([#118204](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118204), [@sttts](https://github.com/sttts))

  Previously, when unschedulable Pods are updated, the scheduler always put Pods back to activeQ/backoffQ. But, actually not all updates to Pods make Pods schedulable, especially considering many scheduling constraints nowadays are immutable.

- Eliminated work when creating Services or understanding port purposes, especially for external resources deployed via Helm charts. ([#133018](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/133018), [@rushmash91](https://github.com/rushmash91))

  - This feature prevents the node and scheduler from oversubscribing resources
    that are still being used by a pod in the process of being cleaned up.
  - This feature can result in increase of Pod Deletion latency especially if the
    pod has a large filesystem footprint.

### RBAC
* **[beta]** RBAC API is promoted to v1beta1 (rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1), and defines default roles for control plane, node, and controller components.

### Bug or Regression

- An inefficient lock in EndpointSlice controller metrics cache has been reworked. Network programming latency may be significantly reduced in certain scenarios, especially in clusters with a large number of Services. ([#107169](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/107169), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Apps and Network]