The first release of 2020 consists of 38 enhancements: 15 enhancements are moving to stable, 11 enhancements in beta, and 12 enhancements in alpha. Kubernetes stated that Kubernetes 1.18 shows the tremendous effort made by the community on improving the reliability of Kubernetes as well as continuing to expand its existing functionality.
Kubernetes Topology Manager
Topology Manager is a beta feature that enables NUMA alignment of CPU and devices (such as SR-IOV VFs) that will allow your workload to run in an environment optimized for low-latency. Before the introduction of the Topology Manager, the CPU and Device Manager would make resource allocation decisions independent of each other. This could result in undesirable allocations on multi-socket systems, causing degraded performance on latency-critical applications.
Server-side Apply was promoted to Beta in 1.16 but is now introducing a second Beta in 1.18. The new version of this feature now tracks and manages changes to fields of all new Kubernetes objects, allowing users to know what changed resources and when.