Leadership Learnings from Kubernetes Releases

Kubernetes releases are an elaborate song and dance running for around 4 months. The releases are done by a team of around 40 people distributed across the globe. A large number of technical components and the distributed nature of the team pose various challenges to the process.

In this talk, I will cover a detailed view of the parts of a Kubernetes release: the ingredients, the recipe and the product, and finally, the learnings from leading a release.

Transcript

1. Leadership learnings from
   Kubernetes releases
   Nabarun Pal
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2. $ whoami
   • Kubernetes Maintainer
   • Senior Engineer at VMware
   • PyCon India Technical Lead
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3. Chapter 1
   The People
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4. Emeritus
   Adviser
   Release Lead
   Release Lead
   Shadows
   Enhancements
   Lead
   Enhancements
   Shadows
   CI Signal Lead
   CI Signal
   Shadows
   BugTriage
   Lead
   BugTriage
   Shadows
   Docs Lead
   Docs
   Shadows
   Release Notes
   Lead
   Release Notes
   Shadows
   Comms Lead
   Comms
   Shadows
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5. Chapter 2
   The Process
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6. IndiaFOSS 2.0 6
   

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7. IndiaFOSS 2.0 7
   

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8. ❯ krel
   krel - The Kubernetes Release toolbox
   krel is the new golang based tool for managing releases. Target of krel is to
   provide a toolkit for managing the different steps needed for creating
   Kubernetes Releases. This includes manually executed tasks, like the generation
   of the release notes during the release cycle, as well as automated tasks like
   pushing the Kubernetes release artifacts to the Google Cloud Storage.
   Each subcommand should contain its own self describing help output which
   clarifies its purpose
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9. ❯ kpromo
   kpromo - Kubernetes project artifact promoter
   kpromo is a tool responsible for artifact promotion.
   It has two operation modes:
   - "run" - Execute a file promotion (formerly "promobot-files")
   - "manifest" - Generate/modify a file manifest to target for promotion
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10. Cadence
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11. Cadence
    • Every 3 months till 2019
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12. Cadence
    • Every 3 months till 2019
    • Every 4 months since 2020
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13. Support
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14. Support
    • 12 months of Standard Support
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15. Support
    • 12 months of Standard Support
    • 2 months of maintenance
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16. Chapter 3
    The Challenges
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17. Distributed Team
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18. Large codebase
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19. Quality
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20. Timeline
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21. Not Enough contributors
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22. Chapter 4
    The Learnings
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23. Overcommunicate
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24. Communicate Asynchronously
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25. Follow Lazy Consensus
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26. Ensure Discipline
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27. "Do, Delegate, Defer"
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28. How can you help?
    Come join us in Kubernetes SIG Release!
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29. How can you help?
    Come join us in Kubernetes SIG Release!
    • Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/
    kubernetes-sig-release
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30. How can you help?
    Come join us in Kubernetes SIG Release!
    • Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/
    kubernetes-sig-release
    • Slack: #sig-release on Kubernetes Slack (slack.k8s.io)
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31. Thank You!
    

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