1.27 mid-cycle update - State of the Release

[Xander Grzywinski]

Hello Kubernetes community,

TL;DR: 78 enhancements post-Enhancements Freeze. Please opt-in your docs and blog PRs by the deadlines below. We are also seeking Major Themes suggestions.

We have been in release 1.27 for a few weeks and would like to give an update just. It’s been a few weeks since the Enhancements Freeze, and we are just 1 week away from code freeze. 

Upcoming important dates (schedule):

1) Code freeze - Tuesday, March 14th

2) Open placeholder PRs for docs - Thursday, March 16th

3) Test freeze - Tuesday, March 21st

4) Docs PRs ready for review - Tuesday, March 21st

Enhancements

We are currently tracking 78 enhancements for the release, and have received no exception requests following enhancements freeze.

Feature Blogs

Feature blog posts are a great way to highlight and further communicate your enhancement and its technical depth and impact to the community. This is especially encouraged for high visibility changes as well as deprecations and removals. To opt-in, request that your SIG lead open a placeholder PR to the website repo.

Documentation
Unless the KEP changes do not require any updates to the website, please open a PR against the `dev-1.27` branch on `kubernetes/website` by Tuesday, March 16th. Instructions to create a placeholder PR are here.

Major Themes
Each release, we choose high impact features to be major themes. You can nominate an enhancement to be a major theme by adding a comment link appropriate links to the feature to the discussion on Github. We kindly request that all SIG Leads and Technical Chairs participate in this collection. Last day for entry is Tuesday, March 21st.

Thank you all so much for your work thus far! For any questions or feedback, please reach out to us on #sig-release.

Xander Grzywinski, on behalf of the 1.27 Release Team.