* Open API now includes strategic merge patch tags (previously only in go struct tags) ([#44121](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/44121), [@mbohlool](https://github.com/mbohlool))

  * Plugins

- Support [service.beta.kubernetes.io/azure-pip-ip-tags] annotations to allow customers to specify ip-tags to influence public-ip creation in Azure [Tag1=Value1, Tag2=Value2, etc.] ([#94114](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/94114), [@MarcPow](https://github.com/MarcPow)) [SIG Cloud Provider]

* AWS Security Groups created for ELBs will now be tagged with the same additional tags as the ELB; that is, the tags specified by the "service.beta.kubernetes.io/aws-load-balancer-additional-resource-tags" annotation. This is useful for identifying orphaned resources. ([#58767](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/58767), [@2rs2ts](https://github.com/2rs2ts))

- Fixed a bug where CEL expressions in CRD validation rules would incorrectly compute a high estimated cost for functions that return strings, lists or maps.

* The Azure cloud provider now supports specifying allowed service tags by the `service.beta.kubernetes.io/azure-allowed-service-tags` annotation. ([#61467](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/61467), [@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer))

- Kubernetes will now consume the AWS region list from the AWS SDK instead of a hard-coded list in the cloud provider. ([#75990](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/75990), [@mcrute](https://github.com/mcrute))
- Limit use of tags when calling EC2 API to prevent API throttling for very large clusters. ([#76749](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/76749), [@mcrute](https://github.com/mcrute))

## Changes by Kind

### API Change

- Fixed a bug where CEL expressions in CRD validation rules would incorrectly compute a high estimated cost for functions that return strings, lists or maps.

- Fix: ignore not a VMSS error for VMAS nodes in EnsureBackendPoolDeleted. (#105402, @ialidzhikov) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: ignore the case when updating Azure tags (#104686, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Revert PR #102925 which introduced unexpected scheduling behavior based on balanced resource allocation (#105238, @damemi) [SIG Scheduling]

In-tree cloud provider bug fixes and improvements included:
- Adding initial Zones support to the provider using vSphere Tags
- Improving the testing harness for the cloud provider by introducing vcsim for automated testing
- Fixing a bug that was preventing updates from 1.10 to 1.11

- Ignore the case when comparing azure tags in service annotation. ([#104705](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/104705), [@nilo19](https://github.com/nilo19))
- Ignore the case when updating Azure tags. ([#104593](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/104593), [@nilo19](https://github.com/nilo19))