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 is marked as failed in the next back-off. ([#114768](https:...

*   Pod preemption has been improved.
    *   Now takes PodDisruptionBudget into account. ([#56178](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/56178),[ @bsalamat](https://github.com/bsalamat))
    *   Nominated pods are taken into account during scheduling to avoid starvation of higher priority pods. ([#55933](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/55933),[ @bsalamat](https://github.com/bsalamat))

For the 1.8 release, SIG Multicluster focussed on expanding the set of
Kubernetes primitives that our Cluster Federation control plane
supports, expanding the number of approaches taken to multi-cluster
management (beyond our initial Federation approach), and preparing
to release Federation for general availability ('GA').

- Added `apiextensions_apiserver_update_ratcheting_time` metric for tracking time taken during requests by feature `CRDValidationRatcheting`. ([#121462](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121462), [@alexzielenski](https://github.com/alexzielenski))

	* Prints out status updates when running `kubefed init` ([#41849](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/41849), [@perotinus](https://github.com/perotinus))

- Kubeadm: fix the bug that configurable KubernetesVersion not respected during kubeadm join ([#111022](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/111022), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle]
- Reduced time taken to sync proxy rules on Windows kube-proxy with kernelspace mode ([#110702](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110702), [@daschott](https://github.com/daschott)) [SIG Network and Windows]

- Add a metric for time taken to perform recursive permission change ([#95866](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/95866), [@JornShen](https://github.com/JornShen)) [SIG Instrumentation and Storage]

- Kubeadm: fix the bug that configurable KubernetesVersion not respected during kubeadm join ([#111024](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/111024), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle]
- Reduced time taken to sync proxy rules on Windows kube-proxy with kernelspace mode ([#110701](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110701), [@daschott](https://github.com/daschott)) [SIG Network and Windows]

- Kubeadm: make sure that `kubeadm init/join` always use a URL scheme (unix:// on Linux and npipe:// on Windows) when passing a value to the `--container-runtime-endpoint` kubelet flag. This flag's value is taken from the kubeadm configuration `criSocket` field or the `--cri-socket` CLI flag. Automatically add a missing URL scheme to the user configuration in memory, but warn them that they should also update their configuration on disk manually. During `kubeadm...

- Pods will now post their readiness during termination. ([#110191](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110191), [@rphillips](https://github.com/rphillips)) [SIG Network, Node and Testing]
- Reduced time taken to sync proxy rules on Windows kube-proxy with kernelspace mode ([#109124](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109124), [@daschott](https://github.com/daschott)) [SIG Network, Release and Windows]