a token with the given audience bound to the current pod and its service account. This KSA token along with required annotations on the KSA defined in configuration will be sent to the credential provider plugin via its standard input (along with the image information that is already sent today). The KSA annotations to be sent are configurable in the kubelet credential provider configuration. ([#128372](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/128372), [@aramase](https://github.com/aramase))...

- A new kubelet metric `image_pull_duration_seconds` was added. The metric tracks the duration (in seconds) it takes for an image to be pulled, including the time spent in the waiting queue of image puller. The metric is broken down by bucketed image size. ([#121719](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121719), [@ruiwen-zhao](https://github.com/ruiwen-zhao))

- Added apiserver.latency.k8s.io/apf-queue-wait annotation to the audit log
  to record the time spent waiting in APF queue. ([#123919](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/123919), [@hakuna-matatah](https://github.com/hakuna-matatah))

  - When registering with a 1.17+ API server, a CustomResourceDefinition conversion webhook can now request that only `v1` ConversionReview requests be sent to them. Previously, conversion webhooks were required to support receiving `v1beta1` ConversionReview...

- The `AdmissionReview` API sent to and received from admission webhooks has been promoted to `admission.k8s.io/v1`. Webhooks can specify a preference for receiving `v1` AdmissionReview objects with `admissionReviewVersions: ["v1","v1beta1"]`, and must respond with an API object in the same `apiVersion` they are sent. When webhooks use `admission.k8s.io/v1`, the following additional validation is performed on their responses:...

### Extensibility around core Kubernetes APIs

#### CustomResourceDefinitions Pruning

    * fixed bugs and improved performance in Stackdriver Sink
* fluentd-gcp addon: Fix a bug in the event-exporter, when repeated events were not sent to Stackdriver. ([#50511](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/50511), [@crassirostris](https://github.com/crassirostris))

- HPA reaction to metric changes has been spend up by removing the scale up forbidden window. ([#66615](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66615), [@jbartosik](https://github.com/jbartosik))

### SIG AWS

- Fixed a kubelet issue that could result in invalid pod status updates to be sent to the api-server where pods would be reported in a terminal phase but also report a ready condition of true in some cases. ([#110479](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110479), [@bobbypage](https://github.com/bobbypage)) [SIG Node and...

- Bookmark events are now sent immediately after all items in the watchCache store have been processed, improving consistency in client behavior. ([#127012](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127012), [@Chaunceyctx](https://github.com/Chaunceyctx))