As a user, I woul like to add, I would like to see a real 2 year support for LTS releases. Hammer releases were sketchy at best in 2017. When luminous was released The outstanding bugs were auto closed, good buy and good readance.
Also the decision to drop certain OS support created a barrier to upgrade and looking at jewel and luminous upgrade path where you cannot easily go back after upgrade is completed doesn't add the confidence.
So making upgrades less radical may help production support to be more consistent and update process less dangerous.
I would say 9 month is a good reference point but for me it is ready when it is really ready and tested.
Keeping development release may be better for devs and early adopters. I don't believe production admins would go for intermediate one's as they being released now.
This is only MHO and may be wrong.
On Sep 9, 2017 15:32, "Christian Theune" <ct@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
have been using Ceph for multiple years now. It’s unclear to me which of your options fits best, but here are my preferences:
* Updates are risky in a way that we tend to rather not do them every year. Also, having seen jewel, we’ve been well off to avoid two
major issues what would have bitten us and will upgrade from hammer in the next month or so.
* Non-production releases are of not much value to me, as I have to keep our dev/staging/prod clusters in sync to work on our stuff.
As you can never downgrade, there’s no value in it for me to try non-production releases (without frying dev for everyone).
* I’d prefer stability over new features. *Specifically* that new features can be properly recombined with existing features (and each
other) without leading to surprises. (E.g. cache tiering breaking with snapshots and then no way going back and a general notion of
“that combination wasn’t really well tested).
* I’d prefer versions that I have to be maintained for production-critical issues maybe 2 years, so I can have some time after a new
production release that overlaps with the new production release receiving important bug fixes until I switch.
Maybe this is close to what your "Drop the odd releases, and aim for a ~9 month cadence.” would say. Waiting for a feature for a year is a pain, but my personal goal for Ceph is that it first has to work properly, meaning: not loose your data, not "stopping the show”, and not drawing you into a corner you can’t get out.
That’s my perspective as a user. As a fellow developer I feel your pain about wanting to release faster and reducing maintenance load, so thanks for asking!
Hope this helps,
Christian
> On Sep 6, 2017, at 5:23 PM, Sage Weil <sweil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Traditionally, we have done a major named "stable" release twice a year,
> and every other such release has been an "LTS" release, with fixes
> backported for 1-2 years.
>
> With kraken and luminous we missed our schedule by a lot: instead of
> releasing in October and April we released in January and August.
>
> A few observations:
>
> - Not a lot of people seem to run the "odd" releases (e.g., infernalis,
> kraken). This limits the value of actually making them. It also means
> that those who *do* run them are running riskier code (fewer users -> more
> bugs).
>
> - The more recent requirement that upgrading clusters must make a stop at
> each LTS (e.g., hammer -> luminous not supported, must go hammer -> jewel
> -> lumninous) has been hugely helpful on the development side by reducing
> the amount of cross-version compatibility code to maintain and reducing
> the number of upgrade combinations to test.
>
> - When we try to do a time-based "train" release cadence, there always
> seems to be some "must-have" thing that delays the release a bit. This
> doesn't happen as much with the odd releases, but it definitely happens
> with the LTS releases. When the next LTS is a year away, it is hard to
> suck it up and wait that long.
>
> A couple of options:
>
> * Keep even/odd pattern, and continue being flexible with release dates
>
> + flexible
> - unpredictable
> - odd releases of dubious value
>
> * Keep even/odd pattern, but force a 'train' model with a more regular
> cadence
>
> + predictable schedule
> - some features will miss the target and be delayed a year
>
> * Drop the odd releases but change nothing else (i.e., 12-month release
> cadence)
>
> + eliminate the confusing odd releases with dubious value
>
> * Drop the odd releases, and aim for a ~9 month cadence. This splits the
> difference between the current even/odd pattern we've been doing.
>
> + eliminate the confusing odd releases with dubious value
> + waiting for the next release isn't quite as bad
> - required upgrades every 9 months instead of ever 12 months
>
> * Drop the odd releases, but relax the "must upgrade through every LTS" to
> allow upgrades across 2 versions (e.g., luminous -> mimic or luminous ->
> nautilus). Shorten release cycle (~6-9 months).
>
> + more flexibility for users
> + downstreams have greater choice in adopting an upstrema release
> - more LTS branches to maintain
> - more upgrade paths to consider
>
> Other options we should consider? Other thoughts?
>
> Thanks!
> sage
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Liebe Grüße,
Christian Theune
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