February 17, 2021 Patch Releases

[davidnuzik]

Notice:
Upstream plans to get patch releases out by 2/17/2021.
v1.17 has reached end of life upstream. We follow what upstream does with releases, and v1.17 will not be included in this month's patch releases as there is nothing to release from upstream.

Summary:
Task covering patch releases work.
Dev Complete: 2/12/2021

List of required releases:
To release as soon as able for QA:

• v1.18.16-rc1+k3s1
• v1.19.8-rc1+k3s1
• v1.20.3-rc1+k3s1

To release once have approval from QA:

• v1.18.16+k3s1
• v1.19.8+k3s1
• v1.20.3+k3s1

Prep work:

• PM: Dev and QA team notified of the incoming releases - send calendar invite
• PM: Dev and QA team notified of the date we will mark the latest release as stable - send calendar invite
• QA: Review changes and understand testing efforts
• Release Captain: Prep PR for rancher/kontainer-driver-metadata (bump patch versions) - work with Menna if needed
• Release Captain: Prepare release notes in our private release-notes repo (submit PR for changes taking care to carefully check links and the components, once approved, enter in GitHub and mark as a draft and check the pre-release box, fill in title, set target release branch, leave tag version blank)
• QA: Validate and close out all issues in the release milestone.

Vendor and release work:

• Release Captain: Vendor in new patch versions into the appropriate branches and release rancher/kubernetes
• Release Captain: Merge PR for rancher/kontainer-driver-metadata into the dev branches (IN PROCESS, we will work to get PRs merged in within the next few days).
• Release Captain: Tag and release any necessary RCs for QA to test KDM
• Release Captain: Tag and release the K3s patches when have QA and PM approval

Post-Release work:

• Release Captain: Once all releases are complete and all release artifacts exist, uncheck "Pre-release" for each
• PM: Create an issue to mark the latest release as stable (this is done typically not later than 1 days post release patch release, 7 days post new minor release) Mark 1.20.4+k3s1 as stable #2858
• Rancher PM: (handled separately offline) Merge in rancher/kontainter-driver-metadata change to release branch (so new patch versions show up as upgrade options in Rancher UI). - Assumes a KDM release is planned soon.
• PM: Close the milestone in GitHub.

[davidnuzik]

Here and going forward, we will separate out checklists much like upstream kubernetes for each milestone (each patch release). Instead of using this issue please reference each #2944, #2943, and #2945.