ensure static pods (especially those that use fixed UIDs) are restarted.  As a side effect of these changes static pods will be restarted with lower latency than before (2s vs 4s, on average) and rapid updates to pod configuration should take effect sooner.
  
  A new metric `kubelet_known_pods` has been added at ALPHA stability to report the number of pods a Kubelet is tracking in a number of internal states.  Operators may use the metrics to track an excess of pods in the orphaned state...

- To avoid soft-deleted pods incorrectly affecting scale up replica count calculations, the HPA controller will stop counting soft-deleted pods for scaling purposes. ([#67067](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/67067), [@moonek](https://github.com/moonek))
- HPA reaction to metric changes has been spend up by removing the scale up forbidden window. ([#66615](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66615), [@jbartosik](https://github.com/jbartosik))