What happened:

When a CronJob has spec.timeZone set to a non-UTC timezone (e.g. Asia/Singapore) and the
kube-state-metrics container image does not include tzdata, kube-state-metrics panics and enters
CrashLoopBackOff, taking down all cluster metrics collection.

The panic originates in internal/store/cronjob.go:254 where getNextScheduledTime() prefixes
the schedule with CRON_TZ=<timezone>, passes it to cron.ParseStandard(), which calls
time.LoadLocation() — failing without tzdata — and the error is passed directly to panic(err)
with no recovery.

What you expected to happen:

The error should be logged and the kube_cronjob_next_schedule_time metric skipped for the
affected CronJob. The process should continue running and serving metrics for all other resources.

How to reproduce it (as minimally and precisely as possible):

# Apply any CronJob with spec.timeZone set to a named timezone
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: tz-test
spec:
  schedule: "0 4 * * 1-5"
  timeZone: "Asia/Singapore"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
          - name: test
            image: busybox
            command: ["echo", "hello"]
          restartPolicy: OnFailure
EOF

# kube-state-metrics will panic immediately with:
# panic: Failed to parse cron job schedule 'CRON_TZ=Asia/Singapore 0 4 * * 1-5':
#        provided bad location Asia/Singapore: unknown time zone Asia/Singapore

Anything else we need to know?:

spec.timeZone is a stable Kubernetes API field since v1.27. The panic(err) in cronjob.go:254
means any cluster using this field with kube-state-metrics deployed without tzdata will lose all
metrics. The fix is two-fold:

1. Replace panic(err) with a logged error that skips the metric for the affected CronJob
2. Include tzdata in the container image so named timezones resolve correctly

Suggested fix for cronjob.go:254:

if err != nil {
    klog.Errorf("failed to compute next schedule time for cronjob %s/%s: %v",
        j.Namespace, j.Name, err)
    return &metric.Family{Metrics: ms}
}

Environment:

• kube-state-metrics version: (please fill in)
• Kubernetes version: v1.32.12
• Cloud provider or hardware configuration: AWS EKS
• Other info: kube-state-metrics container image does not include tzdata; time.LoadLocation() fails for any named timezone