- `rest_client_transport_cache_entries` is a gauge metric
  with the number of existing entries in the internal cache
  
  - `rest_client_transport_create_calls_total` is a counter
  that increments each time a new transport is created, storing
  the result of the operation needed to generate it: hit, miss
  or uncacheable. ([#117295](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/117295), [@aojea](https://github.com/aojea))

### SIG Cluster Lifecycle

SIG Cluster Lifecycle focused on improving kubeadm’s user experience by including a set of new commands related to maintaining the kubeadm configuration file, the API version of which has now has been incremented to `v1alpha2`. These commands can handle the migration of the configuration to a newer version, printing the default configuration, and listing and pulling the required container images for bootstrapping a cluster.

- Changed metadata management for Pods to populate `.metadata.generation` on writes. New pods will have a `metadata.generation` of 1; updates to mutable fields in the Pod `.spec` will result in `metadata.generation` being incremented by 1. ([#130181](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/130181), [@natasha41575](https://github.com/natasha41575)) [SIG Apps, Node and Testing]

- EndpointSlice generation is now incremented when labels change. ([#99750](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/99750), [@robscott](https://github.com/robscott)) [SIG Network]

- Fixed issue with incremental id generation for `loadbalancer` and `endpoint` in `kubeproxy` mock test framework. ([#120723](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/120723), [@princepereira](https://github.com/princepereira))

- New plugin_evaluation_total is added to the scheduler.This metric counts how many times the specific plugin affects the scheduling result. The metric does not get incremented when the plugin has nothing to do with an incoming Pod. ([#115082](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115082), [@sanposhiho](https://github.com/sanposhiho))

    * a. kubectl get pod test-pod -o custom-columns=CONTAINER:.spec.containers[0:3].name
    * b. kubectl get pod test-pod -o custom-columns=CONTAINER:.spec.containers[-2:].name
* scheduler: use incremental scheduling cycle in PriorityQueue to put all in-flight unschedulable pods back to active queue if we received move request ([#73309](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/73309), [@cofyc](https://github.com/cofyc))

For the 1.8 release, SIG Node continued to focus
on a broad set of workload types, including hardware and performance
sensitive workloads such as data analytics and deep learning. The SIG also
delivered incremental improvements to node reliability.

[SIG Node]: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/tree/master/sig-node

### SIG Network

* add goroutine to move unschedulable pods to activeq if they are not retried for more than 1 minute ([#72558](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/72558), [@denkensk](https://github.com/denkensk))
* scheduler: use incremental scheduling cycle in PriorityQueue to put all in-flight unschedulable pods back to active queue if we received move request ([#73309](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/73309), [@cofyc](https://github.com/cofyc))

  previous releases. When this happens, a `LifecycleHTTPFallback` event is recorded
  in the namespace of the pod and a `kubelet_lifecycle_handler_http_fallbacks_total`
  metric in the kubelet is incremented. Cluster administrators can opt out of the
  expanded lifecycle handler capabilities by setting
  `--feature-gates=ConsistentHTTPGetHandlers=false` in `kubelet`.'