* You can find out what taints you have in place on a node while you are still running Kubernetes 1.5 by doing `kubectl describe node <node name>`; the `Taints` section will show the taints you have in place. To see the taints that were created under 1.5 when you are running 1.6, do `kubectl get node <node name> -o yaml` and look for the...

- Newly provisioned PVs by vSphere in-tree plugin will no longer have the beta FailureDomain label. vSphere volume plugin will start to have GA topology label instead. ([#102414](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/102414), [@divyenpatel](https://github.com/divyenpatel)) [SIG Cloud Provider, Storage and Testing]

- Kubeadm: external etcd endpoints passed in the `ClusterConfiguration` that have Unicode characters are no longer IDNA encoded (converted to Punycode). They are now just URL encoded as per Go's implementation of RFC-3986, have duplicate "/" removed from the URL paths, and passed like that directly to the `kube-apiserver` `--etcd-servers` flag. If you have etcd endpoints that have Unicode characters, it is advisable to encode them in advance with tooling that is fully IDNA compliant....

structurally equivalent; that is, they have the same literal structure and corresponding
components have identical types. In detail:
</p>

<ul>
	<li>Two array types are identical if they have identical element types and
	    the same array length.</li>

	<li>Two slice types are identical if they have identical element types.</li>

methods in generated clientsets, dynamic, metadata, and scale clients have been modified to accept `context.Context` as a first argument. Signatures of Create, Update, and Patch methods have been updated to accept CreateOptions, UpdateOptions and PatchOptions respectively. Signatures of Delete and DeleteCollection methods now accept DeleteOptions by value instead of by reference. Generated clientsets with the previous interface have been added in new "deprecated" packages to allow incremental migration...

- Promoted the `CRDValidationRatcheting` feature gate to beta and made it enabled by default.
   ([#121461](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121461), [@alexzielenski](https://github.com/alexzielenski))

* Azure: Container permissions for provisioned volumes have changed to private. If you have existing Azure volumes that were created by Kubernetes v1.6.0-v1.6.5, you should change the permissions on them manually. ([#47605](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/47605), [@brendandburns](https://github.com/brendandburns))

- Made `apiextensions-apiserver` binary linking static (also affects the deb and rpm packages). ([#114226](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/114226), [@saschagrunert](https://github.com/saschagrunert))

### Other notable changes

* hyperkube: add cloud-controller-manager ([#54197](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/54197), [@colemickens](https://github.com/colemickens))

### SIG IBM Cloud