- 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...

- CSIServiceAccountToken graduates to Beta and enabled by default. ([#99298](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/99298), [@zshihang](https://github.com/zshihang))

- 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.

  - [Changelog since v1.23.0](#changelog-since-v1230)
  - [Major Themes](#major-themes)
    - [Dockershim Removed from kubelet](#dockershim-removed-from-kubelet)
    - [Beta APIs Off by Default](#beta-apis-off-by-default)
    - [Signing Release Artifacts](#signing-release-artifacts)
    - [OpenAPI v3](#openapi-v3)

- The kube-proxy sync_proxy_rules_iptables_total metric now gives
  the correct number of rules, rather than being off by one.
  
  Fixed multiple iptables proxy regressions introduced in 1.22:
  
    - When using Services with SessionAffinity, client affinity for an
      endpoint now gets broken when that endpoint becomes non-ready

### Promoted CSI Ephemeral Volume to Stable

- The --leader-elect* CLI args are now honored correctly in scheduler. (#106130, @Huang-Wei) [SIG Scheduling]
- The kube-proxy sync_proxy_rules_iptables_total metric now gives
  the correct number of rules, rather than being off by one.
  
  Fixed multiple iptables proxy regressions introduced in 1.22:
  
    - When using Services with SessionAffinity, client affinity for an
      endpoint now gets broken when that endpoint becomes non-ready

- 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))

- 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))