addition, SIG Cloud Provider has begun exploratory work around having a “cloud provider” e2e test suite which can be used to test common cloud provider functionalities with resources such as nodes and load balancers.

We are also continuing our long running effort to extract all the existing cloud providers that live in k8s.io/kubernetes into their own respective repos. Along with this migration, we are slowly transitioning users to use the cloud-controller-manager for any cloud provider features...

and applications that run in and across multiple clusters.

For the 1.8 release, SIG Multicluster focussed on expanding the set of
Kubernetes primitives that our Cluster Federation control plane
supports, expanding the number of approaches taken to multi-cluster
management (beyond our initial Federation approach), and preparing
to release Federation for general availability ('GA').

The Cluster API effort is currently undergoing a complete rehaul of the existing codebase, moving off Terraform and into using govmomi directly.

### SIG-windows

SIG Windows focused on stability and reliability of our existing feature set. We primarily fixed bugs as we march towards a near future stable release.

## Action Required

- etcd2 as a backend is deprecated and support will be removed in Kubernetes 1.13.

## What’s New (Major Themes)

We’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.16, our third release of 2019! Kubernetes 1.16 consists of 31 enhancements: 8 enhancements moving to stable, 8 enhancements in beta, and 15 enhancements in alpha.

The main themes of this release are:

# v1.18.0-alpha.4

[Documentation](https://docs.k8s.io)

## Important note about manual tag

Due to a [tagging bug in our Release Engineering tooling](https://github.com/kubernetes/release/issues/1080) during `v1.18.0-alpha.3`, we needed to push a manual tag (`v1.18.0-alpha.4`).

- Kubernetes...

    <glob pattern="*.ma"/>
    <glob pattern="*.nb"/>
    <glob pattern="*.mb"/>
    <!-- Note - there is no Unique Magic for Mathematica files! -->
    <!-- Check for a Mathematica-style opening comment as our best hope... -->
    <magic priority="50">
      <match value="(**" type="string" offset="0"/>
      <match value="(* " type="string" offset="0"/>
    </magic>
    <sub-class-of type="text/plain"/>
  </mime-type>

### SIG OpenStack

SIG-OpenStack continued to build out testing, with eleven acceptance tests covering a wide-range of scenarios and use-cases. During the 1.11 cycle our reporting back to test-grid has qualified the OpenStack cloud provider as a gating job for the Kubernetes release.

### Kubernetes release cadence change