Kubernetes v1.34: Snapshottable API server cache

For years, the Kubernetes community has been on a mission to improve the stability and performance predictability of the API server. A major focus of this effort has been taming list requests, which have historically been a primary source of high memory usage and heavy load on the etcd datastore. With each release, we've chipped away at the problem, and today, we're thrilled to announce the final major piece of this puzzle. The snapshottable API server cache feature has graduated to Beta in Kubernetes v1.34, culminating a multi-release effort to allow virtually all read requests to be served directly from the API server's cache. Evolving the cache for performance and stability The path to the current state involved several key enhancements over recent releases that paved the way for today's announcement. Consistent reads from cache (Beta in v1.31) While the API server has long used a cache for performance, a key milestone was guaranteeing consistent reads of the latest data from it. Th