[IMPORTANT] Kubernetes 1.17.2, 1.16.6, 1.15.9 release next week + anago deprecation

[Stephen Augustus]

Hi kubefolx,

The Patch Release Team will be releasing new versions of Kubernetes (1.17.2, 1.16.6, 1.15.9) next week to fix a version tagging issue.
We're tentatively planning for Tuesday, January 21st, by EOD US PT, but given this week's debugging of our build tools, it's possible that this date may shift.

As of today, the build versions that we're targeting are as follows:
- v1.17.2-beta.0.2+59603c6e503c87 (Built at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/59603c6e503c87169aea6106f57b9f242f64df89)
- v1.16.6-beta.0.3+72c30166b2105c (Built at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/72c30166b2105cd7d3350f2c28a219e6abcd79eb)
- v1.15.9-beta.0.3+2e808b7cb054ee (Built at https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commit/2e808b7cb054ee242b68e62455323aa783991f03)

Those commits represent essentially no-op PRs we used to trigger a new build version in CI:
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87334
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87333
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/87332

The new releases will be functionally equivalent to this week's releases, save the few commits we've added to fix the versioning issue:
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/compare/v1.17.1...59603c6
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/compare/v1.16.5...72c3016
- https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/compare/v1.15.8...2e808b7

When 1.17.2, 1.16.6, and 1.15.9 are released, please IMMEDIATELY use them instead of 1.17.1, 1.16.5, and 1.15.8.

Issues opened relating to this versioning issue will be closed as duplicates of https://github.com/kubernetes/release/issues/1020.

---

Patch Release Team -- 

All cherry picks are on hold until we release this week. Please delay ALL approvals until I give the all-clear.

---

Finally, I am announcing anago, the tool we use to stage/release Kubernetes, as deprecated.

While anago has served us for years, it is:
- difficult to understand
- cumbersome to maintain
- largely untestable, outside of manually
- can fail successfully

Tim Pepper and I have spent an inordinate amount of time this week pouring through build logs and mitigating idiosyncrasies in anago, and this is not the kind of time-sink we want for anyone on our Release Managers group to have to deal with going forward.

The Release Engineering subproject has already made some phenomenal progress in starting to refactor/migrate our current tools from bash to Go.

anago will be one of the next ones on that list.
If you're interested in tracking this effort, please subscribe to this issue: https://github.com/kubernetes/release/issues/918


Thanks for your patience this week!
Stephen

[Stephen Augustus]

Hi kubefolx,

Kubernetes v1.17.2, v1.16.6, and v1.15.9 have been released and I believe that brings this part of the saga to a close.

If there are any issues with these releases, please let us know ASAP by:

• Filing an issue in kubernetes/release AND tagging "@kubernetes/release-managers" on it
• After filing the issue, feel free to come chat with us in #release-engineering on Kubernetes Slack

Thanks!

Stephen 

[Stephen Augustus]

Errr, the correct Slack channel is #release-management. Apologies.