- increases the weight of user specifiable priorities.
  The weights of following priority plugins are increased
    - `TaintTolerations` to 3 - as leveraging node tainting to group nodes in the cluster is becoming a widely-adopted practice
    - `NodeAffinity` to 2
    - `InterPodAffinity` to 2
  

### Instrumentation

In v1.9 we focused on improving stability of the components owned by the SIG, including Heapster, Custom Metrics API adapters for Prometheus, and Stackdriver.

### Network

- Enabled ratcheting validation on `status` subresources for CustomResourceDefinitions. ([#129506](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/129506), [@JoelSpeed](https://github.com/JoelSpeed))
- Fix: Adopted go1.23 behavior change in mount point parsing on Windows. ([#129368](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/129368), [@andyzhangx](https://github.com/andyzhangx)) [SIG Storage and Windows]

- The kube-controller-manager's deprecated `--experimental-cluster-signing-duration` flag is now removed. Adapt your machinery to use the `--cluster-signing-duration` flag that is available since v1.19. ([#108476](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108476), [@ialidzhikov](https://github.com/ialidzhikov))

### Structured Logging in Kubelet

  for actions against a CRI endpoint. The kubeadm deb/rpm packages will continue to install the `cri-tools`
  package for one more release, but in you must adapt your scripts to install `crictl` manually from
  https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cri-tools/releases or a different location.
  

  
  Users who maintain controllers which relied on the fact that pods with RestartPolicy=Always
  never enter the Succeeded phase may need to adapt their controllers. This is because as a consequence of 
  the change pods which use RestartPolicy=Always may end up in the Succeeded phase in two scenarios: pod 

### Kubernetes release cadence change