1.34 Strengthening Beta Feature Gate Promotion Requirements
David Eads
tldr: All KEPs moving to beta must include all functional, security, monitoring, and testing requirements along with resolving all issues and gaps identified.
Kubernetes production clusters are trusted to be stable by our users. Beta is our state where features are accessible for usage in production clusters, with a feature gate to disable the feature if it malfunctions. This is “GA-quality without field feedback”. We have updated the KEP template to help guide future KEPs (ref) by explicitly indicating that beta must be complete and promotion from beta to GA must have no significant change for the release. PRR reviewers will check for these criteria during the approval process and help contributors and sig leads explicitly handle promotion criteria.
This is the result of about six months of discussion in sig-architecture and mailing list threads, culminating in kubernetes/enhancements#5242. For the complete details, motivations, and incremental delivery handling, I invite you to read the merged Beta Feature Gate Promotion Requirements document.