written as a defaulted config.' ([#124480](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/124480), [@neolit123](https://github.com/neolit123))
- .status.terminating field now gets tracked faster when active Pods are deleted, specifically when Job is failed, gets suspended or has too many active pods. ([#125175](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/125175), [@dejanzele](https://github.com/dejanzele)) [SIG Apps and Testing]

* Added Establishing Controller on CRDs to avoid race between Established condition and CRs actually served. In HA setups, the Established condition is delayed by 5 seconds. ([#63068](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/63068), [@xmudrii](https://github.com/xmudrii))

  - Different configuration types can be supplied all in the same file separated by `---`.
- Improved CRI handling
  - crictl is no longer required in docker-only setups.
  - Better detection of installed CRI.
  - Better output for image pull errors.
- Improved air-gapped and offline support
  - kubeadm now handles air-gapped environments by using the local client version as a fallback.

- Kubeadm: remove the "ephemeral_storage" request from the etcd static pod that kubeadm deploys on stacked etcd control plane nodes. This request has caused sporadic failures on some setups due to a problem in the kubelet with cadvisor and the LocalStorageCapacityIsolation feature gate. See this issue for more details: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/99305 ([#102673](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/102673),...

 - Kubeadm: increase robustness for "kubeadm join" when adding etcd members on slower setups ([#90645](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/90645), [@neolit123](https://github.com/neolit123)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle]

    * kubeadm upgrade now successfully upgrades etcd and the controlplane to use TLS
    * kubeadm upgrade now supports external etcd setups
    * kubeadm upgrade can now rollback and restore etcd after an upgrade failure

### Bug or Regression

- Fixes a race condition in the iptables mode of kube-proxy in 1.27 and later
  that could result in some updates getting lost (e.g., when a service gets a
  new endpoint, the rules for the new endpoint might not be added until
  much later). ([#122815](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122815), [@wedaly](https://github.com/wedaly)) [SIG Network]

- Fix a bug on the endpoints controller that does not reconcile the Endpoint object after this is truncated (it gets more than 1000 endpoints addresses) ([#127417](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127417), [@aojea](https://github.com/aojea)) [SIG Apps, Network and Testing]

*   Added a new --etcd-upgrade keyword to kubeadm upgrade apply. When this keyword is specified, etcd's static pod gets upgraded to the etcd version officially recommended for a target kubernetes release. ([#55010](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/55010),[ @sbezverk](https://github.com/sbezverk))

- Kubeadm: remove the "ephemeral_storage" request from the etcd static pod that kubeadm deploys on stacked etcd control plane nodes. This request has caused sporadic failures on some setups due to a problem in the kubelet with cadvisor and the LocalStorageCapacityIsolation feature gate. See this issue for more details: https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/99305 ([#102673](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/102673),...