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AWS Cloud Provider Release Process

NOTE: Your GitHub account must have the required permissions and you must have generated a GitHub token.

Choosing the release version

Using semantic versioning, pick a release number that makes sense by bumping the major, minor or patch release version. If its a major or minor release (backwards incompatible changes, and new features, respectively) then you will want to start this process with an alpha release first. Here are some examples:

Bumping a minor version after releasing a new feature:

v1.4.5 -> v1.5.0-alpha.0

After testing and allowing some time for feedback on the alpha, releasing v1.5.0:

v1.4.5 -> v1.5.0

New patch release:

v1.5.3 -> v1.5.4

New major version release with two alpha releases:

v1.6.2 -> v2.0.0-alpha.0
       -> v2.0.0-alpha.1
       -> v2.0.0

Choosing the release branch

You also might need to create a release branch, if it doesn't already exist, if this release requires backporting changes to an older major or minor version. For example, in the case that we are backporting a fix to the v0.5 release branch, and we have a v0.6 release branch (which we don't at the time of writing), then we would do the following:

  1. Create the release branch (named release-0.5) if it doesn't exist from the last v0.5.x tagged release (or check it out if it already exists).
  2. Cherry-pick the necessary commits onto the release branch.
  3. Follow the instructions below to create the release commit.
  4. Create a pull request to merge your fork of the release branch into the upstream release branch (i.e. /cloud-provider-aws/release-0.5 -> kubernetes/cloud-provider-aws/release-0.5).

Create the release commit

Generate the CHANGELOG

We need to generate the CHANGELOG for the new release by running ./hack/changelog.py. You need to pass previous release tag to generate the changelog.

python3 hack/changelog.py --token $GITHUB_TOKEN --changelog-file docs/CHANGELOG.md --section-title  v1.20.0-alpha.1 --range v1.19.0-alpha.1..

This will prepend the changes to the CHANGELOG.md file.

Update the README

Search for any references to the previous version on the README, and update them if necessary. You'll need to update the compatibility table the least.

Update the deployment files

  1. Update Helm values
  2. charts/aws-cloud-controller-manager/Chart.yaml
  3. charts/aws-cloud-controller-manager/values.yaml
  4. Update manifests/aws-cloud-controller-manager-daemonset.yaml

Send a release PR

At this point you should have all changes required for the release commit. Verify the changes via git diff and send a new PR with the release commit against the release branch. Note that if it doesn't exist, you'll need someone with write privileges to create it for you.

Tag the release

Once the PR is merged, pull the release branch locally and tag the release commit with the release tag. You'll need push privileges for this step.

git checkout release-0.7
git pull upstream release-0.7
git tag v0.7.0
git push upstream v0.7.0

Verify the release on GitHub

The new tag should trigger a new Github release. Verify that it has run by going to Releases. Then, click on the new version and verify all assets have been created:

  • Source code (zip)
  • Source code (tar.gz)

Merge the release commit to the main branch

Once the images are promoted, send a PR to merge the release commit to the main branch.