We present an overview on the state of the gas in cluster outskirts. We show that the entropy of the gas in the outskirts often exhibit strong deviations from predictions based on the cluster scaling. We identify the cause of these deviations with incomplete shock propagation observed in clusters with ongoing major merging, survival of substructure and incomplete thermalization, and emission from the surrounding large-scale structure seen in projection.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html