Releases and Updates

Your are currently reading the documentation for the metal-stack master release.

Releases and integration tests are published through our release repository. You can also find the release notes for this metal-stack version in there. The release notes contain information about new features, upgrade paths and bug fixes.

A release is created in the following way:

• Individual repository maintainers within the metal-stack Github Org can publish a release of their component.
• This release is automatically pushed to the develop branch of the release repository by the metal-robot.
• The push triggers a small release integration test through the mini-lab.
• To contribute components that are not directly part of the release vector, a pull request must be made against the develop branch of the release repository. Release maintainers may push directly to the develop branch.
• The release maintainers can /freeze the develop branch, effectively stopping the metal-robot from pushing component releases to this branch.
• The develop branch is tagged by a release maintainer with a -rc.x suffix to create a release candidate.
• The release candidate must pass a large integration test suite on a real environment, which is currently run by FI-TS. It tests the entire machine provisioning engine including the integration with Gardener, the deployment, metal-images and Kubernetes conformance tests.
• If the integration tests pass, the PR of the develop branch must be approved by at least two release maintainers.
• A release is created via Github releases, including all release notes, with a tag on the main branch.

If you want, you can sign up at our Slack channel where we are announcing every new release. Often, we provide additional information for metal-stack administrators and adopters at this place, too.

Update Policy

For new features and breaking changes we create a new minor release of metal-stack. For every minor release we present excerpts of the changes in a corresponding blog article published on metal-stack.io.

It is not strictly necessary to cycle through the patch releases if you depend on the pure metal-stack components. However, it is important to go through all the patch releases and apply all required actions from the release notes. Therefore, we recommend to just install every patch release one by one in order to minimize possible problems during the update process.

In case you depend on the Gardener integration, especially when using metal-stack roles for deploying Gardener, we strongly recommend installing every patch release version. We increment our Gardener dependency version by version following the Gardener update policy. Jumping versions may lead to severe problems with the installation and should only be done if you really know what you are doing.