* version bump for gci to milestone 53 ([#27210](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/27210), [@adityakali](https://github.com/adityakali))
* kubectl apply: retry applying a patch if a version conflict error is encountered ([#26557](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/26557), [@AdoHe](https://github.com/AdoHe))

				// If versioned we have no conflicts.
				fi.SetInlineData()
				return fi, nil
			}

			// For overwritten objects without header we might have a
			// conflict with data written later. Check the data path
			// if there is a part with data.
			partPath := fmt.Sprintf("part.%d", fi.Parts[0].Number)
			dataPath := pathJoin(path, fi.DataDir, partPath)

- Updated `kubectl auth reconcile` to retry reconciliation when a conflict error occurs. ([#133323](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/133323), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG Auth and CLI]

- Kube-apiserver: fixes scale subresource patch handling to avoid returning unnecessary 409 Conflict error to clients ([#90342](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/90342), [@liggitt](https://github.com/liggitt)) [SIG Apps, Autoscaling and Testing]

### Bug or Regression

- A bug was fixed where a job sync was not retried in case of a transient ResourceQuota conflict. ([#111026](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/111026), [@alculquicondor](https://github.com/alculquicondor))

* Let service controller retry creating load balancer when persistUpdate failed due to conflict. ([#68087](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68087), [@grayluck](https://github.com/grayluck))

### Other (Cleanup or Flake)

- For apiserver_storage_size_bytes metric, we are renaming the label for etcd to be "storage_cluster_id" instead of "cluster" to to reduce conflict and be very specific. ([#124294](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/124294), [@dims](https://github.com/dims)) [SIG API Machinery, Instrumentation and Testing]

## Dependencies

### Added

- Kube-apiserver: fixed a conflict error encountered attempting to delete a pod with gracePeriodSeconds=0 and a resourceVersion precondition ([#85516](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/85516), [@michaelgugino](https://github.com/michaelgugino)) [SIG API Machinery]

  This bug causes the conformance test "HostPort validates that there is no conflict between pods with same hostPort but different hostIP and protocol" to fail. ([#98838](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/98838), [@aojea](https://github.com/aojea)) [SIG Network and Node]

### Bug or Regression

### SIG Apps

- The service controller will now retry creating the load balancer when `persistUpdate` fails due to conflict. ([#68087](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/68087), [@grayluck](https://github.com/grayluck))