- The Image Locality priority function of the scheduler has been improved and is now enabled by default. With this feature enabled, nodes that have all or a partial set of images required for running a pod are preferred over other nodes, which improves pod start-up time.
- TaintNodeByCondition has been moved to Beta and is enabled by default.
- Scheduler throughput has been improved by ~50% in large clusters (>2000 nodes).

- Validate Gluster IP ([#83104](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/83104), [@zouyee](https://github.com/zouyee))

### Windows

* discovery.CachedDiscoveryInterface implementation returned by NewMemCacheClient has changed semantics of Invalidate method -- the cache refresh is now deferred to the first cache lookup. ([#70994](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/70994), [@mborsz](https://github.com/mborsz))

- Kubeadm: support experimental JSON/YAML output for `kubeadm upgrade plan` with the `--output` flag. ([#108447](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/108447), [@pacoxu](https://github.com/pacoxu))
- Kubeadm: the preferred pod anti-affinity for CoreDNS is now enabled by default. ([#110593](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/110593), [@SataQiu](https://github.com/SataQiu))

.col-xl-3, .col-xl-4, .col-xl-5, .col-xl-6, .col-xl-7, .col-xl-8, .col-xl-9, .col-xl-10, .col-xl-11, .col-xl-12, .col-xl,\n.col-xl-auto {\n  position: relative;\n  width: 100%;\n  padding-right: 7.5px;\n  padding-left: 7.5px;\n}\n\n.col {\n  -ms-flex-preferred-size: 0;\n  flex-basis: 0;\n  -ms-flex-positive: 1;\n  flex-grow: 1;\n  max-width: 100%;\n}\n\n.row-cols-1 > * {\n  -ms-flex: 0 0 100%;\n  flex: 0 0 100%;\n  max-width: 100%;\n}\n\n.row-cols-2 > * {\n  -ms-flex: 0 0 50%;\n  flex: 0 0 50%;\n  max-width:...

- Add support for CEL expressions with escaped names in structured authentication config.  Using `[` for accessing claims or user data is preferred when names contain characters that would need to be escaped.  CEL optionals via `?` can be used in places where `has` cannot be used, i.e. `claims[?"kubernetes.io"]` or `user.extra[?"domain.io/foo"]`. ([#131574](https://github.com/kubernetes/kub...

* [GCE] Apiserver uses `InternalIP` as the most preferred kubelet address type by default. ([#59019](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/59019), [@MrHohn](https://github.com/MrHohn))

   ([#123341](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/123341), [@neolit123](https://github.com/neolit123))

### etcd moves to version 3.5.0