Prior to 1.17 and for existing nodes created by `kubeadm init` where kubelet client certificate rotation is desired, you must modify `/etc/kubernetes/kubelet.conf` to point to the PEM symlink for rotation:

- Added two client certificate metrics for exec auth:
    - `rest_client_certificate_expiration_seconds` a gauge reporting the lifetime of the current client certificate. Reports the time of expiry in seconds since January 1, 1970 UTC.

  - Some kubeadm commands are now allowed to work in a completely offline mode.
- Certificate handling improvements:
  - Renew certs as part of upgrade.
  - New `kubeadm alpha phase certs renew` command for renewing certificates.
  - Certificates created with kubeadm now have improved uniqueness of Distinguished Name fields.
- HA improvements:

### Cluster Lifecycle

- Fixed an issue where the `vsphere` cloud provider would not trust a certificate if:
  - The issuer of the certificate was unknown (`x509.UnknownAuthorityError`)
  - The requested name did not match the set of authorized names (`x509.HostnameError`)

        * requests from a node for a TLS serving certificate for itself are approved if the CSR creator has `create` permission on the `certificatesigningrequests` resource and the `selfnodeserver` subresource in the `certificates.k8s.io` API group

- kubeadm: Allowed to download certificate secrets uploaded by `init` or `upload-certs` phase, allowing to transfer certificate secrets (certificates and keys) from the cluster to other master machines when creating HA deployments. ([#74168](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74168), [@ereslibre](https://github.com/ereslibre))

        * requests from a node for a TLS serving certificate for itself are approved if the CSR creator has `create` permission on the `certificatesigningrequests` resource and the `selfnodeserver` subresource in the `certificates.k8s.io` API group

* Allows extension API server to dynamically discover the requestheader CA certificate when the core API server doesn't use certificate based authentication for it's clients ([#66394](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66394), [@rtripat](https://github.com/rtripat))

- Kubeadm: add support for certificate chain validation. When using kubeadm in external CA mode, this allows an intermediate CA to be used to sign the certificates. The intermediate CA certificate must be appended to each signed certificate for this to work correctly. ([#97266](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/97266), [@robbiemcmichael](https://github.com/robbiemcmichael))...