- Fix kube-apiserver not to create default/kubernetes service endpoints before it reports readiness via the /healthz and therefore is ready to serve requests. Also early during startup old endpoints are remove which might be left over from a previously crashed kube-apiserver. ([#74668](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74668), [@sttts](https://github.com/sttts))

- Improved FormatMap: Improves performance by about 4x, or nearly 2x in the worst case ([#112661](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/112661), [@aimuz](https://github.com/aimuz)) [SIG Node]

- `ValidatingAdmissionPolicy` now preserves types of composition variables, and raises type-related errors early. ([#121001](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121001), [@jiahuif](https://github.com/jiahuif))

The focus of this release is **compatibility** with Pydantic v1 and v2, to make sure your current apps keep working. Later there will be more focus on refactors, correctness, code improvements, and then **performance** improvements. Some third-party early beta testers that ran benchmarks on the beta releases of FastAPI reported improvements of **2x - 3x**. Which is not bad for just doing `pip install --upgrade fastapi pydantic`. This was not an official benchmark and I didn't check it myself, but it's...

- [`KT-24901`](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-24901) No smart cast for `when` with early return
- [`KT-53086`](https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-53086) "Cannot access '<init>' before superclass constructor has been called" with inner class secondary constructor

- Endpoint slice controller now mirrors parent's service label to its corresponding endpoint slices....

- Fixed: deleted a non-existent Azure disk issue. ([#107406](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/107406), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx))
- Fixed: do not return early in the node informer when there is no change of the topology label. ([#108149](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108149), [@nilo19](https://github.com/nilo19))

### SIG-windows

SIG Windows focused on stability and reliability of our existing feature set. We primarily fixed bugs as we march towards a near future stable release.

## Action Required

- etcd2 as a backend is deprecated and support will be removed in Kubernetes 1.13.

* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@andrewsykim](https://github.com/andrewsykim))

* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@andrewsykim](https://github.com/andrewsykim))