mirror of https://github.com/grafana/loki
Adding release cadence docs (#8893)
**What this PR does / why we need it**: Members of our community often ask about our release cadence, so I have documented it for easy future reference. --------- Signed-off-by: Danny Kopping <danny.kopping@grafana.com> Co-authored-by: J Stickler <julie.stickler@grafana.com>pull/8968/head^2
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title: Release cadence |
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description: How our release process works |
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weight: 1 |
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--- |
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# Release cadence |
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## Stable Releases |
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Loki releases (this includes [Promtail](/clients/promtail), [Loki Canary](/operations/loki-canary/), etc) use the following |
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naming scheme: `MAJOR`.`MINOR`.`PATCH`. |
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- `MAJOR` (roughly once a year): these releases include large new features & possible backwards-compatibility breaks. |
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- `MINOR` (roughly once a quarter): these releases include new features which generally do not break backwards-compatibility, but from time to time we might introduce _minor_ breaking changes, and we will specify these in our upgrade docs. |
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- `PATCH` (roughly once or twice a month): these releases include bug & security fixes which do not break backwards-compatibility. |
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> **NOTE:** While our naming scheme resembles [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/), at this time we do not strictly follow its |
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guidelines to the letter. Our goal is to provide regular releases that are as stable as possible, and we take backwards-compatibility |
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seriously. As with any software, always read the [release notes](/release-notes) and the [upgrade guide](/upgrading) whenever |
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choosing a new version of Loki to install. |
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New releases are based of a [weekly release](#weekly-releases) which we have vetted for stability over a number of weeks. |
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We strongly recommend keeping up-to-date with patch releases as they are released. We post updates of new releases in the `#loki` channel |
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of our [Slack community](/community/getting-in-touch). |
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You can find all of our releases [on GitHub](https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases) and on [Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/loki). |
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## Weekly Releases |
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Every Monday morning, we create a new "weekly" release from the tip of the [`main` branch](https://github.com/grafana/loki). |
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These releases use the following naming scheme: |
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<ul> |
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<code>weekly-k<week-number></code> where <code><week-number></code> is the number of weeks since we began this process (2020-07-06). |
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</ul> |
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These weekly releases are deployed across our Grafana Cloud Logs fleet of instances. We test these releases for stability |
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by deploying them through development, pre-production, and production instances. |
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Generally these weekly releases are considered stable enough to run, but we provide zero stability guarantees and these |
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releases _should not be run in production_ unless you are willing to tolerate some risk. |
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You can find these releases on [Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/loki/tags?page=1&name=k). |
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### Which release will my merged PR be part of? |
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Once your PR is merged to `main`, you can expect it to become available in the next week's |
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[weekly release](#weekly-releases). To find out which stable or weekly releases a commit is included in, use the following tool: |
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`tools/which-release.sh` |
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For example, [this PR](https://github.com/grafana/loki/pull/7472) was [merged](https://github.com/grafana/loki/pull/7472#event-8431624850) |
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into the commit named `d434e80`. Using the tool above, we can see that is part of release 2.8 and several weekly releases: |
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```bash |
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$ ./tools/which-release.sh d434e80 |
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Commit was found in the following releases: |
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release-2.8.x |
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Commit was found in the following weekly builds: |
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k136 |
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k137 |
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k138 |
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k139 |
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k140 |
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k141 |
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k142 |
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``` |
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