- Some kubeadm commands are now allowed to work in a completely offline mode.
- Certificate handling improvements:
  - Renew certs as part of upgrade.
  - New `kubeadm alpha phase certs renew` command for renewing certificates.
  - Certificates created with kubeadm now have improved uniqueness of Distinguished Name fields.
- HA improvements:

### Migration

   * to prove its primality. Values from miller-rabin.appspot.com.
   *
   * NOTE: We could get slightly better bases that would be treated as unsigned, but benchmarks
   * showed negligible performance improvements.
   */
  private static final long[][] millerRabinBaseSets = {
    {291830, 126401071349994536L},
    {885594168, 725270293939359937L, 3569819667048198375L},

    - [CustomResourceDefinition OpenAPI Publishing](#customresourcedefinition-openapi-publishing)
  - [Cluster Lifecycle Stability and Usability Improvements](#cluster-lifecycle-stability-and-usability-improvements)
  - [Continued improvement of CSI](#continued-improvement-of-csi)
    - [Additional Notable Feature Updates](#additional-notable-feature-updates)
  - [Known Issues](#known-issues)

* Metadata Agent Improvements ([#66485](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/66485), [@bmoyles0117](https://github.com/bmoyles0117))
    * Bump metadata agent version to 0.2-0.0.21-1.
    * Expand the metadata agent's access to all API groups.

		//
		// This happens repeatedly for all objects that are created concurrently() avoiding this
		// as a List() call is an important performance improvement.
		//
		// Spark based s3a committers are a  big enough use-case to have this optimization.
		//
		// A sample code to see the improvements is as follows, this sample code is
		// simply a read on JSON from MinIO and write it back as "parquet".
		//

* Don't log private SSH key ([#24506](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/24506), [@timstclair](https://github.com/timstclair))
* Incremental improvements to kubelet e2e tests ([#24426](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/24426), [@pwittrock](https://github.com/pwittrock))

### Auth

- Kubeadm: apply further improvements to the tentative support for concurrent etcd member join. Fixes a bug where multiple members can receive the same hostname. Increase the etcd client dial timeout and retry timeout for add/remove/... operations. ([#87505](https://github.com/kub...

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

[SIG Network][] is responsible for networking components, APIs, and plugins in Kubernetes.