Kubernetes v1.35: Watch Based Route Reconciliation in the Cloud Controller Manager

Up to and including Kubernetes v1.34, the route controller in Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) implementations built using the k8s.io/cloud-provider library reconciles routes at a fixed interval. This causes unnecessary API requests to the cloud provider when there are no changes to routes. Other controllers implemented through the same library already use watch-based mechanisms, leveraging informers to avoid unnecessary API calls. A new feature gate is being introduced in v1.35 to allow changing the behavior of the route controller to use watch-based informers. What's new? The feature gate CloudControllerManagerWatchBasedRoutesReconciliation has been introduced to k8s.io/cloud-provider in alpha stage by SIG Cloud Provider . To enable this feature you can use --feature-gate=CloudControllerManagerWatchBasedRoutesReconciliation=true in the CCM implementation you are using. About the feature gate This feature gate will trigger the route reconciliation loop whenever a node is added, deleted,