[INFO] 1.8 Release status update

[Jaice Singer DuMars]

Hello Kubernetes Community,

This is the first in what I hope will be regular updates on the status of the 1.8 release.  As a convention, things that need community help will be in bold text so you can quickly scan for places to pitch in.  While we have an amazing release team, there may still be areas where community and SIG-specific help is needed.

One specific advisory to share is that the pull-kubernetes-e2e-aws test is in non-blocking mode due to a number of unfortunate conditions that are preventing successful tests.  Rather than wholesale disable it, we felt it was important to retain visibility while we work towards resolution of the underlying circumstances.  

Where we're at in the timeline:

If you want to see where we're at in the timeline, it's here.  In summary, we are working on stabilization, bug fixes, as well as identifying any possible release-blocking defects or regressions.  We're also collecting and curating documentation so our community can digest what is in and out of the release.  Our release-specific meetings will begin on Wednesday.  If you'd like to attend, please let me know and I will add you.  

The release so far:

After code freeze on Friday, branch manager Adam Worrall and myself created a snapshot of all pull requests that were LGTM'ed and Approved, so they would be merged over the weekend into master, despite being in the 1.8 milestone.  On Saturday, we corrected a problem with OpenAPI regeneration, as well as some other test-related issues that happen after cutting the branch.  After that, the submit queue gradually drained as expected.

The release team is currently reviewing a couple of extension requests, as well as facilitating bug fixes.  If you need to get attention on your PR, and it's not time-critical, add @kubernetes/kubernetes-release-managers.  If you need quicker response, you can also @jdumars (me).  If it's urgent, do both of those things, as well as messaging in the Kubernetes #sig-release Slack channel.  

Outstanding needs:

Unfortunately, the release notes draft is still missing a lot of information.  We need all SIGs to update this draft with their relevant information ASAP.  Please make sure the SIG check box is also set when you've finalized your entries.

In the Features repo issues, we also need SIG help pulling things out of the 1.8 milestone if they did not actually make it into the release before code freeze.  This helps us ensure parity between documentation/marketing efforts and the release.  

Lastly, if there's an issue in kubernetes/kubernetes that you feel is critical to the health of the release, please make sure it's added to the 1.8 milestone so we can triage, track, and address it.

Thank you all for your assistance during this process.  And, huge thanks to everyone who spent hours over the holiday weekend working on restoring the submit queue.

All my best,

Jaice, 1.8 Release team leader

[Peter Zhao]

We may also want to take this issue into consideration.

Consider splitting CHANGELOG in separate files

https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/48985