* Deprecate auto detecting cloud providers in kubelet. Auto detecting cloud providers go against the initiative for out-of-tree cloud providers as we'll now depend on cAdvisor integrations with cloud providers instead of the core repo. In the near future, `--cloud-provider` for kubelet will either be an empty string or `external`.  ([#51312](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/51312), [@and...

([#64706](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/64706), [@liztio](https://github.com/liztio))

- Fix: do not delete the lb that does not exist (#105777, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: ignore not a VMSS error for VMAS nodes in EnsureBackendPoolDeleted. (#105185, @ialidzhikov) [SIG Cloud Provider]
- Fix: leave the probe path empty for TCP probes (#105253, @nilo19) [SIG Cloud Provider]

- The node annotation alpha.kubernetes.io/provided-node-ip is no longer set ONLY when `--cloud-provider=external`.  Now, it is set on kubelet startup if the `--cloud-provider` flag is set at all, including the deprecated in-tree providers. ([#109794](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/109794), [@mdbooth](https://github.com/mdbooth)) [SIG Network and Node]

      - [Application Deployment](#application-deployment-1)
      - [Cluster Autoscaling](#cluster-autoscaling)
      - [Cloud Provider Enhancement](#cloud-provider-enhancement)
      - [Cluster Provisioning](#cluster-provisioning)
      - [Cluster federation](#cluster-federation-1)
      - [Credential provider](#credential-provider)

SIG-VMware development was primarily focused on fixing bugs for the in-tree cloud provider, starting the development of the external cloud provider and taking ownership of the cluster-api provider for vSphere.

In-tree cloud provider bug fixes and improvements included:
- Adding initial Zones support to the provider using vSphere Tags
- Improving the testing harness for the cloud provider by introducing vcsim for automated testing

natively within Kubernetes, without exposing an HTTP endpoint or
using an extra executable.

### Kubelet Credential Provider Graduates to Beta

Originally released as Alpha in Kubernetes 1.20, the kubelet's support for
[image credential providers](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/kubelet-credential-provider/kubelet-credential-provider/)
has now graduated to Beta.

- The in-tree cloud provider for AWS (and the EBS storage plugin) has now been removed. Please use the external cloud provider and CSI driver from https://github.com/kubernetes/cloud-provider-aws instead. ([#115838](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/115838), [@torredil](https://github.com/torredil)) [SIG API Machinery,...

* The AWS credential provider can now obtain ECR credentials even without the AWS cloud provider or being on an EC2 instance. Additionally, AWS credential provider caching has been improved to honor the ECR credential timeout. ([#75587](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/75587), [@tiffanyfay](https://github.com/tiffanyfay))

- Fix: set nil cache entry based on old cache ([#87591](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87591), [@aramase](https://github.com/aramase)) [SIG Cloud Provider]