- Scheduler: in 1.29 pre-releases, enabling contextual logging slowed down pod scheduling. ([#121715](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121715), [@pohly](https://github.com/pohly)) [SIG Instrumentation and Scheduling]

- Added `apiserver.latency.k8s.io/authentication` annotation to the audit log to record the
  time spent authenticating slow requests. Also added `apiserver.latency.k8s.io/authorization`
  annotation to record the time spent authorizing slow requests. ([#130571](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/130571), [@hakuna-matatah](https://github.com/hakuna-matatah))

* AWS now checks for validity of ecryption key when creating encrypted volumes. Dynamic provisioning of encrypted volume may get slower due to these checks. ([#65223](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/65223), [@jsafrane](https://github.com/jsafrane))

- Fix the regression with the slow pods termination. Before this fix pods may take an additional time to terminate - up to one minute. Reversing the change that ensured that CNI resources cleaned up when the pod is removed on API server. ([#97980](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/97980),...

- 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]

- Fix the regression with the slow pods termination. Before this fix pods may take an additional time to terminate - up to one minute. Reversing the change that ensured that CNI resources cleaned up when the pod is removed on API server. ([#97980](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/97980),...

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 instead of the kube-controller-manager.

### SIG Cluster Lifecycle

 - 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]

- Revised `OpenAPI v2` fetching for CustomResourceDefinitions. CRDs are now aggregated lazily,
  which improves resource usage during installation of many CRDs. As a result, the first request
  to fetch the OpenAPI may be slower. ([#118808](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118808), [@Jefftree](https://github.com/Jefftree))

- Don't prematurely close reflectors in case of slow initialization in watch based manager to fix issues with inability to properly mount secrets/configmaps. ([#104604](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/104604), [@wojtek-t](https://github.com/wojtek-t))