What is the purpose of the change

This is a backport of #27095.

Now there are e2e failures on azure: https://dev.azure.com/apache-flink/98463496-1af2-4620-8eab-a2ecc1a2e6fe/_build/results?buildId=70100

I've had a deeper look and found the following: it started breaking because the Microsoft-hosted Ubuntu image the pipeline runs on changed overnight (Oct 3 → Oct 4). That update brings a newer toolchain (Ubuntu 22.04.5 + Docker 28.0.4, and a FIPS-hardened Go/kubectl stack). The kube step then crashes (kubectl exits with status 2) and your bash step dies with “STDIO streams did not close…”, so the Flink Kubernetes e2e never even really starts. It’s an agent/image regression, not a Flink change.

Brief change log

Bump vmImage version to ubuntu-24.04 to match the compatibility + use latest kubectl.

Verifying this change

Azure run.

Does this pull request potentially affect one of the following parts:

• Dependencies (does it add or upgrade a dependency): no
• The public API, i.e., is any changed class annotated with @Public(Evolving): no
• The serializers: no
• The runtime per-record code paths (performance sensitive): no
• Anything that affects deployment or recovery: JobManager (and its components), Checkpointing, Kubernetes/Yarn, ZooKeeper: no
• The S3 file system connector: no

Documentation

• Does this pull request introduce a new feature? no
• If yes, how is the feature documented? not applicable