- Fixed the behavior of the `KUBE_PROXY_NFTABLES_SKIP_KERNEL_VERSION_CHECK` environment variable in the nftables proxier. The kernel version check is now skipped only when this variable is explicitly set to a non-empty value. To skip the check, set the `KUBE_PROXY_NFTABLES_SKIP_KERNEL_VERSION_CHECK` environment variable. ([#130401](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/130401), [@ryota-sakamoto](https://github.com/ryota-sakamoto))

* Scale max-inflight limits together with master VM sizes. ([#73268](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/73268), [@wojtek-t](https://github.com/wojtek-t))
* kubeadm: explicitly wait for `etcd` to have grown when joining a new control plane ([#72984](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/72984), [@ereslibre](https://github.com/ereslibre))

### Internal Storage Layer
* upgrade to etcd3 prior to upgrading to 1.6 **OR** explicitly specify `--storage-backend=etcd2 --storage-media-type=application/json` when starting the apiserver

### Node Components
* **Kubelet with the Docker-CRI implementation**

ClusterRoleBindings/RoleBindings with the email address of the service account directly. (This is a breaking change if the numeric uniqueIDs of the Google service accounts were being used in RBAC role bindings. The behavior can be overridden by explicitly specifying the scope values as comma-separated string in the "users[*].config.scopes" field in the KUBECONFIG file.) This way, users can now  set a Google Service Account JSON key in the  GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, craft...

* Advanced auditing is the default auditing mechanism at `v1beta1`. The new version introduces the following changes:

  * The `--audit-policy-file` option is required if the `AdvancedAuditing` feature is not explicitly turned off (`--feature-gates=AdvancedAuditing=false`) on the API server.
  * The audit log file defaults to JSON encoding when using the advanced auditing feature gate.

    - `kubectl create clusterrolebinding anonymous-discovery --...

*   The kubeadm `--skip-preflight-checks` flag is now deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

- GRPC probes are now a GA feature. `GRPCContainerProbe` feature gate was locked to default value and will be removed in v1.29. If you were setting this feature gate explicitly, please remove it now. ([#116233](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116233), [@SergeyKanzhelev](https://github.com/SergeyKanzhelev))

- Reverts graceful node shutdown to match 1.21 behavior of setting pods that have not yet successfully completed to "Failed" phase if the GracefulNodeShutdown feature is enabled in kubelet. The GracefulNodeShutdown feature is beta and must be explicitly configured via kubelet config to be enabled in 1.21+. This changes 1.22 and 1.23 behavior on node shutdown to match 1.21. If you do not want pods to be marked terminated on node shutdown in 1.22 and 1.23, disable the GracefulNodeShutdown feature....

   1. Currently, if users were to explicitly specify CacheSize of 0 for KMS provider, they would end-up with a provider that caches up to 1000 keys. This PR changes this behavior.
      Post this PR, when users supply 0 for CacheSize this will result in a validation error.
   2. CacheSize type was changed from int32 to *int32. This allows defaulting logic to differentiate between cases where users explicitly supplied 0 vs. not supplied any value.