- [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), [@alexanderConstantinescu](https://github.com/alexanderConstantinescu))

  - in cases where the client specifies a timeout in the request URL, the overall request deadline is shortened now since the deadline is setup as soon as the request is received by the apiserver. ([#96901](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/96901), [@tkashem](https://github.com/tkashem)) [SIG API Machinery and Testing]

#### New Deprecations

* As a reminder, etcd2 as a backend is deprecated and support will be removed in Kubernetes 1.13. Please ensure that your clusters are upgraded to etcd3 as soon as possible.

  * Passed all the Kubernetes 1.7 end-to-end conformance test suites.
  * Verification against Kubernetes 1.8 is planned soon after the release.

* [stable] [frakti](https://github.com/kubernetes/frakti): CRI implementation for hypervisor-based runtimes is now v1.1. [[@feiskyer](https://github.com/feiskyer)]

- github.com/rogpeppe/fastuuid: 6724a57
- github.com/ryanuber/go-glob: 256dc44
- github.com/sergi/go-diff: v1.0.0
- github.com/shirou/gopsutil: c95755e
- github.com/shirou/w32: bb4de01
- github.com/shurcooL/go-goon: 37c2f52
- github.com/shurcooL/go: 9e1955d
- github.com/sourcegraph/go-diff: v0.5.1
- github.com/tarm/serial: 98f6abe
- github.com/tidwall/pretty: v1.0.0
- github.com/timakin/bodyclose: 87058b9

#### Rkt runtime Known Issues

- A detailed list of known issues can be found [here](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes.github.io/blob/release-1.3/docs/getting-started-guides/rkt/notes.md)

*More Instructions coming soon*

## Provider-specific Notes

* AWS
  * Support for ap-northeast-2 region (Seoul)
  * Allow cross-region image pulling with ECR
  * More reliable kube-up/kube-down
  * Enable ICMP Type 3 Code 4 for ELBs

  as a failure until that Pod is terminal (its `.status.phase` is `Failed` or `Succeeded`).
  
  However, the Job controller creates a replacement Pod as soon as the termination becomes apparent.
  Once the pod terminates, the Job controller evaluates `.backoffLimit` and `.podFailurePolicy` for the
  relevant Job, taking this now-terminated Pod into consideration.
  

  * Caveat: The alpha version no longer supports, and the beta version does not support, the "empty `podAffinityTerm.namespaces` list means all namespaces" behavior. In both alpha and beta it now means "same namespace as the pod...

- Added `apiserver_longrunning_requests` metric to replace the soon to be deprecated `apiserver_longrunning_gauge` metric. ([#103799](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/103799), [@jyz0309](https://github.com/jyz0309))

- Promote StatefulSet minReadySeconds to GA. This means `--feature-gates=StatefulSetMinReadySeconds=true` are not needed on kube-apiserver and kube-controller-manager binaries and they'll be removed soon following policy at https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/using-api/deprecation-policy/#deprecation ([#110896](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110896), [@ravisantoshgudimetla](https://github.com/ravisantoshgudimetla)) [SIG API Machinery,...