✨ (go/v4) : Improve Kind Integration: Ensure Custom Kind Binary is Used in E2E Tests

[kersten]

Description

This PR refines the existing Kind integration by ensuring that the KIND environment variable is consistently used across e2e test utilities. While PR #4615 made the Kind binary configurable in the Makefile, some test scripts and utilities still relied on the default "kind" binary directly. This change ensures that all test components respect the KIND variable.

Motivation

• Consistency: The Makefile already supports a configurable Kind binary, but test utilities did not.
• Flexibility: Users running Kind from a custom location (or via a wrapper script) can now ensure it is used everywhere.
• CI/CD Compatibility: Some environments may not have kind globally available in $PATH.

Changes

• Updated test utilities (test/utils/utils.go) to check for a KIND environment variable before defaulting to "kind".
• Modified Makefile test commands to explicitly pass KIND=$(KIND) to go test.
• Applied changes across multiple test setups, including the cronjob tutorial, multiversion tutorial, and project scaffolds.
• Ensured that Kind cluster name configurability introduced earlier remains functional.

Notes

• Maintains full backward compatibility (defaults to kind if KIND is not set).
• No breaking changes.
• Further improves Kind integration by making both cluster names and binary paths configurable across all test components.

[k8s-ci-robot]

Hi @kersten. Thanks for your PR.

I'm waiting for a kubernetes-sigs member to verify that this patch is reasonable to test. If it is, they should reply with /ok-to-test on its own line. Until that is done, I will not automatically test new commits in this PR, but the usual testing commands by org members will still work. Regular contributors should join the org to skip this step.

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[kersten]

/ok-to-test

[k8s-ci-robot]

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[kersten]

@camilamacedo86 could you trigger the tests?

[camilamacedo86]

Hi @kersten

I added some coments see that when we change the scaffolds done by the tool we should not use 🌱 ( for those cases we need to use ✨ - new features and enhancements OR 🐛 for bug fixes )

[camilamacedo86]

/ok-to-test

[camilamacedo86]

I checked this one again 👍
I think is a good approach
I got what you were doing here
PS; just changed the title since it will change the default scaffolds so should end up in the release notes

/lgtm

[k8s-ci-robot]

[APPROVALNOTIFIER] This PR is APPROVED

This pull-request has been approved by: camilamacedo86, kersten

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