* More expressive node affinity syntax, and support for “soft” node affinity.
Node selectors (to constrain pods to schedule on a subset of nodes) now support
the operators {<code>In, NotIn, Exists, DoesNotExist, Gt, Lt</code>}  instead of just conjunction of exact match on node label values. In
addition, we’ve introduced a new “soft” kind of node selector that is just a

- 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))

* By default, clusters on GCE no longer send RequestReceived audit event, if advanced audit is configured. ([#52343](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/52343), [@crassirostris](https://github.com/crassirostris))
* [BugFix] Soft Eviction timer works correctly ([#52046](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/52046), [@dashpole](https://github.com/dashpole))

* By default, clusters on GCE no longer sends RequestReceived audit event, if advanced audit is configured. ([#52343](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/52343), [@crassirostris](https://github.com/crassirostris))
* [BugFix] Soft Eviction timer works correctly ([#52046](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/52046), [@dashpole](https://github.com/dashpole))

### CLI Improvements
- The kubectl's api-resource command now has a `--sort-by` flag to sort resources by name or kind. ([#81971](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/81971), [@laddng](https://github.com/laddng))

* kubectl: fixes regression in --sort-by behavior ([#71805](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/71805), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

- The `matchLabelKeys/mismatchLabelKeys` feature is introduced to the hard/soft `PodAffinity/PodAntiAffinity`. ([#116065](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116065), [@sanposhiho](https://github.com/sanposhiho))

* Azure cloudprovider: Fix controller manager crash issue on a manually created k8s cluster. ([#53694](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/53694), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx))
* Fix a bug where soft eviction would not trigger when the threshold was crossed ([#52046](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/52046), [@dashpole](https://github.com/dashpole))

* Handle federated service name lookups in kube-dns. ([#25727](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/25727), [@madhusudancs](https://github.com/madhusudancs))
* Support sort-by timestamp in kubectl get ([#25600](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/25600), [@janetkuo](https://github.com/janetkuo))

* Enable customize in kubectl: kubectl will be able to recognize directories with kustomization.YAML ([#70875](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/70875), [@Liujingfang1](https://github.com/Liujingfang1))
* Stably sort controllerrevisions. This can prevent pods of statefulsets from continually rolling. ([#66882](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66882), [@ryanmcnamara](https://github.com/ryanmcnamara))