- TLS timeouts have been extended to work around slow arm64 math/big functions. ([#66264](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66264), [@joejulian](https://github.com/joejulian))

defined a concrete process for scalability testing, created
documentation for the current scalability thresholds, and defined a new set of
Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for the system.
Here's the release [scalability validation report].

[SIG Scalability]: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-scalability

SIG Storage made a lot of progress in the 1.18 release.
In particular, the following storage features are moving to GA in Kubernetes 1.18:

  For more information, see [#56357](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/56357).

*   Audit logging is slow because writes to the log are performed synchronously with requests to the log. This issue will be fixed in a future release.

  For more information, see [#53006](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/53006).

- Fix the regression with the slow pods termination. Before this fix pods may take an additional time to terminate - up to one minute. Reversing the change that ensured that CNI resources cleaned up when the pod is removed on API server. ([#97980](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/97980),...

### Other notable changes

* Extend TLS timeouts to work around slow arm64 math/big ([#66264](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66264), [@joejulian](https://github.com/joejulian))

### SIG Scheduling

* fix smb mount issue ([#65751](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/65751), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx))
* Extend TLS timeouts to work around slow arm64 math/big ([#66264](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66264), [@joejulian](https://github.com/joejulian))

  * Bootstrap reworked to be more similar to GCE; better supports reboots/restarts
  * Use an elastic IP for the master by default
  * Experimental support for node spot instances (set NODE\_SPOT\_PRICE=0.05)

#### GCE

  * Ubuntu Trusty support added

- E2E storage tests: setting test tags like `[Slow]` via the `DriverInfo.FeatureTag` field is no longer supported. ([#121391](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/121391), [@pohly](https://github.com/pohly))