[Retrospective] Release 1.2.4

[abhinavGupta16]

How to use this issue?

Please add comments to this issue, they can be small or large in scope. Honest feedback is important to improve our processes, suggestions are also welcomed but not required.

What will happen to this issue post release?

There will be a discussion(s) about how the release went and how the next release can be improved. Then this ticket will be updated with the notes of that discussion along side action items.

[abhinavGupta16]

Listing items following the retrospective meeting earlier today -

Kudos

• To everyone participated in the 1.2.4 patch release activity.

Went Well

• The release was on-time
• We have the process and infrastructure in place to do patch release at defined cadence ( ~ 4 days or less)
• JCenter issues did not affect the release timeline and were fixed promptly
• Lead up was uneventful, very little scrambling as the release was prepared
• We contained it to the workday for all relevant time zones!
• The promotion workflow is smoother than before. We are able to release tarball/docker/maven quick

To Improve

• Scheduling: was launch call was scheduled late and opposite some important, large meetings
• Release Notes: There were a lot of game day calls and crafting that delayed the launch (3hrs delay)
• Release notes needs to strictly follow the pattern we have established multiple times:
  https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-plugins/blob/main/RELEASE_NOTES.md
• We need a secondary engineer assigned for release launch activity in case the primary is having issues
• Tag is created through a manual script and missed the common-utils repo
  Automate the creation of release tags after every release #378 (comment)
• What artifacts changed wasn’t entirely clear - could have been communicated more clearly.
• Documentation website update is not there even until today, 4 days after the release of 1.2.4.
• Helm and Ansible repo needs automatic function to create update to latest version, as they are not being updated after the OS release until a few days later
• Documentation and website don’t get updated in sync automatically.
• We need to add verifications to things like native plugins, docker, tarball after promote to prod env, so we do not need to manually download and verify anymore, including link checker
• Not sure if intentional but there is no news post on opensearch.org (http://opensearch.org/) for 1.2.4 unlike other releases

Action Items

• Have mandatory and optional invites on the release meeting invites
• We can look into failing the build if the release notes are not found. This would help in future automation for tags and generating release notes
• Mechanism to check and verify the format for release notes
• Automate creation of tags
• List artifacts to be released as a part of the release issue for transparency
• Prepare a PR for updating the website documentation in advance. There also needs to be someone with merge rights on the release call to merge the PR
• Create an issue to update the website documentation till 1.2.4
• Update the documentation for Install a plugin on - https://opensearch.org/docs/latest/opensearch/install/plugins/
• Automate upgrading Helm and Ansible
• Create issue to automate testing after promotion to prod

[abhinavGupta16]

Action Items followup -

• Automate upgrading Helm and Ansible

  • [CI] Need automate version bump PR to be opened once OpenSearch/Dashboards release new versions helm-charts#205
  • [CI] Need automate version bump PR to be opened once OpenSearch/Dashboards release new versions ansible-playbook#36

• Create an issue to update the website documentation till 1.2.4

  • [FEATURE] Update the plugin page with releases automatically documentation-website#379
  • Update the website Documentation for releases documentation-website#378

[abhinavGupta16]

We'll continue working on the action items discussed during the retrospective. Closing this issue.