- Changed how KMS v2 encryption at rest can generate data encryption keys. When you enable the `KMSv2KDF` feature gate (off by default), KMS v2 uses a key derivation function to generate single use data...

* Advanced auditing is the default auditing mechanism at `v1beta1`. The new version introduces the following changes:

  * The `--audit-policy-file` option is required if the `AdvancedAuditing` feature is not explicitly turned off (`--feature-gates=AdvancedAuditing=false`) on the API server.
  * The audit log file defaults to JSON encoding when using the advanced auditing feature gate.

- The job controller back-off logic is now decoupled from workqueue. In case of parallelism > 1, if there are multiple new failures in a reconciliation cycle, all the failures are taken into account to compute the back-off. Previously, the back-off kicked in for all types of failures; with this change, only pod failures are taken into account. If the back-off limits exceeds, the job is marked as failed immediately; before this change, the job...

- In-tree cloud providers are now switched off by default. Please use `DisableCloudProviders` and `DisableKubeletCloudCredentialProvider` feature flags if you still need this functionality. ([#117503](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/117503), [@dims](https://github.com/dims))

- Kubeadm: added the "--cleanup-tmp-dir" flag for `kubeadm reset`. It will cleanup the contents of `/etc/kubernetes/tmp`. The flag is off by default. ([#112172](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/112172), [@chendave](https://github.com/chendave))

- Text logging in Kubernetes components now uses [textlogger](https://pkg.go.dev/k8s.io/klog/v2@v2.120.0/textlogger). The same split streams of info and error log entries with buffering of info entries is now also supported for text output (off by default, alpha feature). Previously, this was only supported for JSON. Performance is better also without split streams. ([#114672](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/114672), [@pohly](https://github.com/pohly))