Kubernetes v1.32: State of the release and important deadlines [Week 4]

[Frederico Muñoz]

Greetings, Kubernetes community!

... Have a try therefore at something, and banish all sorrow from your
mind. Your return home will not be long delayed, for the ship is already drawn
into the water.

-- The Odyssey, Book VIII

As week 4 of the Kubernetes v1.32 release ends [0], another quick update
on the state of the release.

We have released the first cut, Kubernetes v1.32.0-alpha 1 [1], with a few days
of delay as previously communicated by the release Branch Manager [2]. The bump
from Go v1.22.8 to v1.23.2 led to the discovery of challenge involving the
unavailability of Debian bullseye-base Go images for certain architectures, the
details of which are included in yesterday's email message from SIG Release [3],
which contains an important call for feedback.

The Production Readiness Freeze was last Thursday, October 3rd: this is the
deadline by which the PRR section of the KEP should be filled out. I refer you
to John Belamaric's recent message [5] about the meaning of it, and I reinforce
his call for all KEP owners to be responsive over the next week to make sure
that enhancements can get into v1.32.

We are slightly less than one week away to Enhancements Freeze, the cutoff date
for inclusion of opted-in enhancements: 02:00 UTC Friday 11th October 2024 /
19:00 PDT Thursday 10th October 2024. I sent a last call [6] with the major
numbers of the project board, following the previous call from the Enhancements
lead three days ago [7].

Enhancements Freeze is thus our next major deadline, and v1.32-alpha.2 the next
release, currently planned for October 15th, as reflected on the release
calendar [8].

All the best,

--
Frederico Muñoz

Kubernetes v1.32 Release Lead
on behalf of the Release Team

[0]: https://github.com/kubernetes/sig-release/blob/master/releases/release-1.32/README.md
[1]: https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/dev/c/xdjdT41t4UA/m/p8TD_tanBAAJ
[2]: https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/dev/c/xdjdT41t4UA/m/QbfiT8i5AgAJ
[3]: https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/dev/c/LBlLCWdFN-o/m/YtGXW-qZBAAJ
[4]: https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/sig-architecture/production-readiness.md
[5]: https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/dev/c/jzEqhIsiMCY/m/BPK6GEtFBAAJ
[6]: https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/dev/c/9blOl07EdYc/m/G7If3_DTBAAJ
[7]: https://groups.google.com/a/kubernetes.io/g/dev/c/-5bXqOEIsRU/m/UrxEKvYsAQAJ
[8]: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/embed?src=agst.us_b07popf7t...@group.calendar.google.com