- Fix a bug in kube-proxy that caused it to crash when using load balancers with a different IP family ([#87117](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87117), [@aojea](https://github.com/aojea)) [SIG Network]

- Client-go: Optimized leaders renewing leases by updating leader lock optimistically without getting the record from the API server first. Also, a new metric `leader_election_slowpath_total` was added to allow users to monitor how many leader elections are updated non-optimistically.
   ([#122069](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122069), [@linxiulei](https://github.com/linxiulei))
- Locked the GA feature-gate `ConsistentHTTPGetHandlers` to default.

* Performance test framework and basic tests for the IPAM controller, to simulate behavior of the four supported modes under lightly loaded and loaded conditions, where load is defined as the number of operations to perform as against the configured kubernetes. ([#61143](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/61143), [@satyasm](https://github.com/satyasm))

- Kubeadm now prints warnings instead of throwing errors if the current system time is outside of the NotBefore and NotAfter bounds of a loaded certificate.  ([#94504](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/94504), [@neolit123](https://github.com/neolit123))

- Suspend job to GA. The feature gate SuspendJob is locked and will be removed in 1.26. ([#108129](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108129), [@ahg-g](https://github.com/ahg-g))...

- Fixed a regression since 1.24 in the scheduling framework when overriding MultiPoint plugins (e.g. default plugins).
  The incorrect loop logic might lead to a plugin being loaded multiple times, consequently preventing any Pod from being scheduled, which is unexpected. ([#122370](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/122370), [@caohe](https://github.com/caohe)) [SIG Scheduling]

- Added Coordinated Leader Election as Alpha under the `CoordinatedLeaderElection` feature gate. With the feature enabled, the control plane can use LeaseCandidate objects (coordination.k8s.io/v1alpha1 API group) to participate in a leader election and let the kube-apiserver select the best instance according to some strategy. ([#124012](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/124012),...

### Cloud Provider

- The `--leader-elect*` CLI args are now honored in scheduler. ([#105915](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/105915), [@Huang-Wei](https://github.com/Huang-Wei))

#### Load Balancing
* [stable] Source IP Preservation - change Cloud load-balancer strategy to health-checks and respond to health check only on nodes that host pods for the service. See [Create an External Load Balancer - Preserving the client source IP](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/create-external-load-balancer/#preserving-the-client-source-ip).