Release 24.7

[NickLarsenNZ]

Stackable Release 24.7

Important

Important dates:

• 17th June - Release planning
• Plan to do the busy work (pre-release testing) during the on-site.

Known issues

Release checklists

General pre-requisites (before feature freeze)

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1. Bump operator-rs to latest version in all operators. This should be done early in the release cycle to leave sufficient time for testing etc.
2. Check Rust and e.g. cargo deps versions
3. Run/check getting-started scripts
4. Run/check demos with dev release and main branch and create draft PR for release-related changes
5. Update demo docs and screenshots
6. Ensure integration tests are successful on OpenShift
7. Test SDP release upgrade against several demos (i.e. install release, run demo, bump release, check what needs to be patched)
8. Run all of the test suites

Other release-specific pre-requisites

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1. ...

Feature freeze

This will not be so crucial with release branches, but is nonetheless sensible as it will make it easier to cherry-pick any release-related bugfixes from main into the release branch.

End of the release cycle (Release day)

Technical tasks

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1. Create release branches for docker-images (see stackable-utils for script to create branches)
2. Create release tag(s) for docker-images (see stackable-utils for scripts to create tags)
3. Create release branches for operators (see stackable-utils for script to create branches)
4. Create release tag(s) for operators (see stackable-utils for scripts to create tags)
5. Create release tag for stackable-cockpit (optional, highly experimental, requires manual tag creation)
6. Update changelogs in main branches (see stackable-utils for script to do this)
7. Generate CRD docs website for the new release by following these instructions
8. Check (selected) integration tests
9. Check getting started scripts (use a table in Nuclino)
10. Run/check getting-started scripts
11. Run/check demos with dev release and main branch and create draft PR for release-related changes
12. Test with locally updated (to new release number) releases.yaml
13. Update release.yaml in https://github.com/stackabletech/release/blob/main/releases.yaml
14. Check that an upgrade can be performed on an existing cluster without data loss.
15. Run all of the test suites

Documentation tasks

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1. Check the Changelog and/or issue labels to compile Release Highlights
2. Upgrade guide: Document how to use stackablectl to uninstall all and install new release
3. Upgrade guide: Document how to use helm to uninstall all and install new release
4. Upgrade guide: Every breaking change of all our operators
5. Upgrade guide: List dropped supported product versions (if there are some)
6. Upgrade guide: List dropped supported operators (if there are some)
7. Upgrade guide: List supported k8s versions
8. Update version of main documentation repo
9. Set the release to "Released" in the Feature Tracker and create a new release
10. Update the getting-started page in the main docs and check it works with this release: https://github.com/stackabletech/documentation/blob/main/modules/ROOT/pages/getting_started.adoc

Marketing tasks can now reference published documentation.

Marketing tasks

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1. Write marketing / customer oriented release summary to be published in the marketing channels
2. Update the homepage banner (as long as we have it) to point to the new release
3. Write a blogpost / news article announcing the new release (optional)
4. Write a description of new demos for homepage/demos section
5. Announce Release on LinkedIn
6. Announce Release in Newsletter (optional)
7. Produce a release highlight video (optional)
8. Announce Release on Hacker News (optional)
9. Post an announcement in the GitHub Discussions Announcement forum and make it a pinned discussion while at the same time removing the old pinned thread
10. Post an announcement in Discord
11. Post an announcement on DOK Community in the #be-shameless Channel (Ping Lars or Jim)
12. Post an announcement via OSBA (Ping Lars)
13. Send announcement to Kubernetes Podcast (Ping Lars)
14. Send announcement to Heiser
15. Ping the stackable-ionos-tech channel or anyone responsible once all tags are created

Post-release tasks

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1. Bump Rust version. This can be done in this file by changing rust_version and also for the ubi base image here. Please be aware that this action will change it for all repositories at the same time (when merging the templating PRs).
2. Check/bump versions of kube-rs and k8s-openapi (also checking the version of k8s we build against)
3. Check/bump ubi8 base image
4. preflight now checks automatically it's own version and only runs if latest Check/bump preflight
5. Openshift certification
6. Define product versions to include in the next release
7. Add branch protection to release branches once they are stable