### Apps

The core workloads API, which is composed of the DaemonSet, Deployment, ReplicaSet, and StatefulSet kinds, has been promoted to GA stability in the apps/v1 group version. As such, the apps/v1beta2 group version is deprecated, and all new code should use the kinds in the apps/v1 group version.

### Auth

[@yujuhong](https://github.com/yujuhong))

* The Container Runtime Interface (CRI) version has increased from v1alpha1 to v1alpha2. Runtimes implementing the CRI will need to update to the new version, which configures container namespaces using an enumeration rather than booleans. This change to the alpha API is not backwards compatible; implementations of the CRI such as containerd, will need to update to the new API version. ([#58973](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/58973), [@verb](htt...

- Kubectl version changed to write a warning message to stderr if the client and server version difference exceeds the supported version skew of +/-1 minor version. ([#98250](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/98250), [@brianpursley](https://github.com/brianpursley)) [SIG CLI]

- The go version defined in `.go-version` is now fetched when invoking test, build, and code generation targets if the current go version does not match it. Set $FORCE_HOST_GO=y while testing or building to skip this behavior, or set $GO_VERSION to override the selected go version. ([#115377](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115377), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG Testing]...

### Autoscaling

 - Consuming metrics directly from Heapster is deprecated in favor of
   consuming metrics via an aggregated version of the resource metrics API.

   - In version 1.8, enable this behavior by setting the
     `--horizontal-pod-autoscaler-use-rest-clients` flag to `true`.

    * Deprecated element metav1.ObjectMeta and Timestamp are removed from audit Events in v1 version.
    * Default value of option --audit-webhook-version and --audit-log-version will be changed from `audit.k8s.io/v1beta1` to `audit.k8s.io/v1` in release 1.13

- The resource version option, when passed to a list call, is now consistently interpreted as the minimum allowed resource version.  Previously when listing resources that had the watch cache disabled clients could retrieve a snapshot at that exact resource version.  If the client requests a resource version newer than the current state, a TimeoutError is returned suggesting the client retry in a few seconds....

- Kubeadm: upgrade supports fallback to the nearest known etcd version if an unknown k8s version is passed ([#88373](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/88373), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu)) [SIG Cluster Lifecycle]

* kubectl: This client version requires the `apps/v1` APIs, so it will not work against a cluster version older than v1.9.0. Note that kubectl only guarantees compatibility with clusters that are +/-1 minor version away. ([#61419](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/61419), [@enisoc](https://github.com/enisoc))

 
## Changes by Kind

### Deprecation

- Changed `kubectl version` default output to be identical to what `kubectl version --short` printed,
  and removed `--short` flag entirely. ([#116720](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/116720), [@soltysh](https://github.com/soltysh))