Release Cadence

The Spinnaker team is committed to providing a regular release cadence in order to help users understand when new features will be available, as well as help non-core developers plan to get their features released in the next stable version of Spinnaker.

Cutting the Release Branches

Every eight weeks, we cut release branches for the upcoming release. If the version we intend to release is M.N, a branch with the name release-M.N.x is cut in each component repository. For example, see the state of the Clouddriver repository leading up to the 1.6 release:

We call this snapshot of all the Spinnaker repositories the “Release Candidate”.

Running the Release Candidate

If you’re brave enough to run the Release Candidate, please file bugs or alert us on slack if you find any problems!

Once these release branches are cut, anyone can run the release candidate using version release-M.N.x-latest-unvalidated:

# this would be version 'release-1.6.x-latest-unvalidated' for 1.6
hal config version edit --version release-M.N.x-latest-unvalidated

hal deploy apply

Patching the Release Candidate

If you’ve found a fix for a bug in the Release Candidate, follow the patching procedure . If your patch is merged before the release candidate is marked stable , it will be included in this release.

Unless a severe error (e.g. security vulnerability, large-scale breakage) has a pending patch, patch releases are published at a weekly cadence on a best-effort basis.

Marking the Release Candidate Stable

Once the community has deemed that the Candidate is “stable” (meaning all integration tests are passing, and no known issues or regressions remain), we will release Spinnaker at version M.N.0. Further patches can be merged into the release branch for future patch releases (e.g. M.N.1).

Upcoming Releases

There’s a public calendar you can subscribe to which includes important release dates.

• If you use Google Calendar, subscribe .
• If you don’t use Google Calendar or have trouble with the first link, you can copy this iCal URL to subscribe using your calendar app of choice (instructions for Google , Apple Calendar ):

  https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/spinnaker.io_p2n8segvlnel4cbo777em35b0c%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
  

• If you don’t want to subscribe directly, you can check the calendar below:

Alternatively, join the spinnaker-announce Google Group (requires a Google account) or the spinnaker-releases Slack channel for updates.