Release Process

Change milestone

  • Create a new GitHub milestone for the next release
  • Change milestone applier so new changes can be applied to the appropriate release
    • Open a PR in https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra to change this line
      • Example PR: https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/16827

Prepare branch, tag and release notes

  • Identify a known good commit on the main branch
  • Fast-forward the release branch to the selected commit. :warning: Always release from the release branch and not from master!
    • git checkout release-0.x
    • git fetch upstream
    • git merge --ff-only upstream/master
    • git push
  • Create tag with git
    • export RELEASE_TAG=v0.4.6 (the tag of the release to be cut)
    • git tag -s ${RELEASE_TAG} -m "${RELEASE_TAG}"
    • git push upstream ${RELEASE_TAG}
  • Update the file metadata.yaml if is a major or minor release
  • make release from repo, this will create the release artifacts in the out/ folder
  • Install the release-notes tool according to instructions
  • Export GITHUB_TOKEN
  • Run the release-notes tool with the appropriate commits. Commits range from the first commit after the previous release to the new release commit.
release-notes --github-org kubernetes-sigs --github-repo cluster-api-provider-azure \
--start-sha 1cf1ec4a1effd9340fe7370ab45b173a4979dc8f  \
--end-sha e843409f896981185ca31d6b4a4c939f27d975de
  • Manually format and categorize the release notes

Promote image to prod repo

Promote image

  • Images are built by the post push images job
  • Create a PR in https://github.com/kubernetes/k8s.io to add the image and tag
    • Example PR: https://github.com/kubernetes/k8s.io/pull/1030/files
  • Location of image: https://console.cloud.google.com/gcr/images/k8s-staging-cluster-api-azure/GLOBAL/cluster-api-azure-controller?rImageListsize=30

Release in GitHub

Create the GitHub release in the UI

  • Create a draft release in GitHub and associate it with the tag that was created
  • Copy paste the release notes
  • Upload artifacts from the out/ folder
  • Publish release
  • Announce the release

Versioning

cluster-api-provider-azure follows the semantic versionining specification.

Example versions:

  • Pre-release: v0.1.1-alpha.1
  • Minor release: v0.1.0
  • Patch release: v0.1.1
  • Major release: v1.0.0

Expected artifacts

  1. A release yaml file infrastructure-components.yaml containing the resources needed to deploy to Kubernetes
  2. A cluster-templates.yaml for each supported flavor
  3. A metadata.yaml which maps release series to cluster-api contract version
  4. Release notes

Communication

Patch Releases

  1. Announce the release in Kubernetes Slack on the #cluster-api-azure channel.

Minor/Major Releases

  1. Follow the communications process for pre-releases
  2. An announcement email is sent to kubernetes-sig-azure@googlegroups.com and kubernetes-sig-cluster-lifecycle@googlegroups.com with the subject [ANNOUNCE] cluster-api-provider-azure <version> has been released