KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Kubernetes releases are a herculean task and involve 1000s of contributors. Maintaining open-source projects can be a fun and rewarding experience. But along with that comes instances where contributors need to firefight challenging situations. And those challenging situations come with every Kubernetes release. And more often than not, fixing those issues requires deep expertise in the project, which is possessed only by a small set of people. However, firefighting in this manner is not sustainable both for the project and the contributors. To give a few examples, Kubernetes 1.24 release was almost at a standstill because of a bug introduced in the Go 1.18 standard library and how missing a few edge cases leads to a release blocking scalability regression. However, this is not the only situation. We keep facing such situations release after release, and pretty sure other projects face the same. In this session, we will recall the above incidents, what we learnt from them, and how you, as CNCF project maintainers, can avoid such situations and ensure sustainability for your contributors. Outline - Introduction and Setting the context (5min) - Why were the releases delayed? (5min) - What went right? (5min) - What could be done better? (5min) - Takeaways (15min)