training-guides/doc/upstream-training/source/01-release-cycle.rst

OpenStack Release Cycle

What is OpenStack?

• Open source software for creating private and public clouds
• Coordinated collection of software from a few dozen related projects
• Projects are teams of people focused on implementing a specific aspect of OpenStack
  • Core services such as Block Storage ("Cinder")
  • Supporting services such as Common Libraries ("Oslo")
  • Horizontal teams such as Documentation

What makes a release

• A way to coordinate the development of multiple projects
• Until Kilo "integrated release" meant a date when all the projects are released at the end of the development cycles
• Integrated projects were also tested together at the gate
• For Liberty integrated projects are those managed by the Release Management Team
• Other projects may have different schedules
  • Each project team page shows its release policy on http://governance.openstack.org/reference/projects

Planning : Design

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• Planning stage is at the start of a cycle
• Take a step back
• Focus on what we want to do for the next one

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Planning : Discuss

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• With our peers
• Feedback and comments
• Create the corresponding blueprint
• 4 weeks, Design Summit on the third week

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Planning : Target

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• File new blueprints and/or specs
• Set a target milestone
• When in the cycle they intend to complete it
• PTLs triage the submitted blueprints and set priority

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Implementation : Milestone

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• Pushed to Gerrit for peer review
• Weeks before the milestone publication date
• Milestone-proposed branch
• Feature-frozen

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Implementation : freezes

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• Feature proposal freeze
  • Not even proposals for features will be accepted
  • Focus on bug-fixing
• Feature freeze
  • New features will not be accepted, only fixes
• String freeze
  • All externally visible strings must be frozen
  • This helps the i18n and Documentation projects

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Release Candidates

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• After the last milestone
  • File bugs about everything you find
  • Prioritize bugs / bug triage
  • Write documentation
  • Fix as many bugs as you can

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Release candidate 1

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• Between the last milestone and the RC1
  • Stop adding features and concentrate on bug fixes
  • Once all the release-critical bugs are fixed, we produce the first release candidate for that project (RC1)
  • Used as-is as the final release

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Other release candidates

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• Regressions and integration issues
  • New release-critical bugs
• (RC2), with bugs targeted to it
  • Merged in the master branch first
  • Repeated as many times as necessary

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Release day

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• Last published release candidate
• Published collectively as the OpenStack release

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Exercise

Based on the Kilo release schedule, find the URL of a document or a patch that belongs to each of the steps.