- The Pod API field `.spec.schedulingGates[*].name` now requires qualified names (like `example.com/mygate`), matching validation for names of `.spec.readinessGates[*].name`. Any uses of the alpha scheduling gate feature prior to 1.27 that do not match that validation must be renamed or deleted before upgrading to 1.27. ([#115821](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115821), [@lianghao208](https://github.com/lianghao208)) [SIG Apps...

    *   Make crictl command more user friendly and add more subcommands.
    *   Integrate with CRI verbose option to provide extra debug information.
    *   Update CRI to kubernetes v1.9.
    *   Bug fixes in validation test suites.

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
[scalability validation report]: https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/blob/master/releases/release-1.8/scalability_validation_report.md

### SIG Scheduling

- EndpointSlice IP validation now matches Endpoints IP validation. ([#101084](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/101084), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Apps and Network]

    * [prometheus-to-sd addon] Bump prometheus-to-sd to 0.3.1 to pick up security fixes, bug fixes and new features.
    * [event-exporter addon] Bump event-exporter to 0.2.3 to pick up security fixes.
* Fix validation for HealthzBindAddress in kube-proxy when --healthz-port is set to 0 ([#66138](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66138), [@wsong](https://github.com/wsong))

- Added fields `reason` and `fieldPath` into CRD validation rules to allow users to specify reason and field path when validation failed. ([#118041](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/118041), [@cici37](https://github.com/cici37)) [SIG API Machinery]

- Fixed EndpointSlice port name validation to match Endpoint port name validation (allowing port names longer than 15 characters) ([#84481](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/84481), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott))

This release contains changes that address the following vulnerabilities:

### CVE-2021-25735: Validating Admission Webhook does not observe some previous fields

A security issue was discovered in kube-apiserver that could allow node
updates to bypass a Validating Admission Webhook. You are only affected
by this vulnerability if you run a Validating Admission Webhook for Nodes
that denies admission based at least partially on the old state of the

* fixes a validation error that could prevent updates to StatefulSet objects containing non-normalized resource requests ([#66165](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66165), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt))

* Fix a bug on GCE that /etc/crictl.yaml is not generated when crictl is preloaded. ([#66877](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66877), [@Random-Liu](https://github.com/Random-Liu))
* Fix validation for HealthzBindAddress in kube-proxy when --healthz-port is set to 0 ([#66138](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66138), [@wsong](https://github.com/wsong))