- [KCCM - service controller]: enabled connection draining for terminating pods upon node downscale by the cluster autoscaler. This is done by not reacting to the taint used by the cluster autoscaler to indicate that the node is going away soon, thus keeping the node referenced by the load balancer until the VM has been completely deleted. ([#115204](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115204),...

- Kube-controller-manager: the `horizontal-pod-autoscaler-upscale-delay` and `horizontal-pod-autoscaler-downscale-delay` flags have been removed (deprecated and non-functional since v1.12). ([#124948](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/124948), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG API Machinery, Apps and Autoscaling]...

- Restartable init containers resource in pod autoscaler are now calculated. ([#120001](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120001), [@qingwave](https://github.com/qingwave))

replicaCount | [replica count](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/deployment/)
hpaSpec | [HorizontalPodAutoscaler](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-pod-autoscale/)
podDisruptionBudget | [PodDisruptionBudget](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/disruptions/#how-disruption-budgets-work)

- Updated `Cluster Autosaler` to version 1.26.1. ([#116526](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116526), [@pacoxu](https://github.com/pacoxu)) [SIG Autoscaling and Cloud Provider]