Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
On 06/17/2014 01:16 PM, Michael Kjellman wrote: That being said I don’t think i’m alone by identifying the problem. FWIW I'm not doing anything wildly unusual and I've been on a fork for as long as I've been on 1.2 (and various times before). Almost everyone being on 1.2 with 3 other equally weighted active branches seems like an obvious not-great situation for running cassandra or developing. I like the idea of shortening the release cycle and LTS style releases and they feel like the most direct approach. I'm a little wary of more branches since that could backfire and make the problem worse.
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Jonathan Ellis jbel...@gmail.com wrote: What if we tried a quicker release cycle, BUT we would guarantee that you could do a rolling upgrade until we bump the supermajor version? So 2.0 could upgrade to 3.0 without having to go through 2.1. (But to go to 3.1 or 4.0 you would have to go through 3.0.) I was thinking of something along those lines so I'm in favor of giving that a try. More precisely, I was thinking we could lower the release cycle to 4 month (less feels hard to achieve) but make a supermajor only every 2 releases (or less often, though guarantee that you could do a rolling upgrade imply that we rigorously test that and I think aiming for 2 release in a row initially is a good start). It's worth acknowledging that this will probably involve a tad more merging work but it feels that increase might be reasonable. -- Sylvain On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 8:27 AM, Chris Burroughs chris.burrou...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/17/2014 01:16 PM, Michael Kjellman wrote: That being said I don’t think i’m alone by identifying the problem. FWIW I'm not doing anything wildly unusual and I've been on a fork for as long as I've been on 1.2 (and various times before). Almost everyone being on 1.2 with 3 other equally weighted active branches seems like an obvious not-great situation for running cassandra or developing. I like the idea of shortening the release cycle and LTS style releases and they feel like the most direct approach. I'm a little wary of more branches since that could backfire and make the problem worse. -- Jonathan Ellis Project Chair, Apache Cassandra co-founder, http://www.datastax.com @spyced
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
Humm — sorry guys — I never got Chris or Jonathan’s responses for some reason. That being said, sounds like a good compromise Sylvain. Fingers crossed this turns into a good experiment! Thanks best, kjellman On Jun 24, 2014, at 10:09 AM, Sylvain Lebresne sylv...@datastax.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Jonathan Ellis jbel...@gmail.com wrote: What if we tried a quicker release cycle, BUT we would guarantee that you could do a rolling upgrade until we bump the supermajor version? So 2.0 could upgrade to 3.0 without having to go through 2.1. (But to go to 3.1 or 4.0 you would have to go through 3.0.) I was thinking of something along those lines so I'm in favor of giving that a try. More precisely, I was thinking we could lower the release cycle to 4 month (less feels hard to achieve) but make a supermajor only every 2 releases (or less often, though guarantee that you could do a rolling upgrade imply that we rigorously test that and I think aiming for 2 release in a row initially is a good start). It's worth acknowledging that this will probably involve a tad more merging work but it feels that increase might be reasonable. -- Sylvain On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 8:27 AM, Chris Burroughs chris.burrou...@gmail.com wrote: On 06/17/2014 01:16 PM, Michael Kjellman wrote: That being said I don’t think i’m alone by identifying the problem. FWIW I'm not doing anything wildly unusual and I've been on a fork for as long as I've been on 1.2 (and various times before). Almost everyone being on 1.2 with 3 other equally weighted active branches seems like an obvious not-great situation for running cassandra or developing. I like the idea of shortening the release cycle and LTS style releases and they feel like the most direct approach. I'm a little wary of more branches since that could backfire and make the problem worse. -- Jonathan Ellis Project Chair, Apache Cassandra co-founder, http://www.datastax.com @spyced
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
I totally understand where you are coming from, I've been in the same situation before, but; In my experience the only time you want new features in your database is during development, once the application you built is in production and stable you really _never_ want to upgrade the db until there is something major solved (like repair in 2.1 or streaming in 2.0). Then, even if we did backport features to these experimental branches, you are extremely likely to fall far behind in those as well, making it equally painful to qa/upgrade. I think I would have appreciated having an LTS-like-version back when I was running clusters where I could basically automate rolling minor versions without having to worry about something breaking and then once every 6 months/year bite the bullet and do the QA needed for a major upgrade. So maybe it would be worth it having branches/releases something like: 3.0: bug fixes 3.1: bug fixes from 3.0 + small new non-breaking features trunk (future 4.0): everything from 3.1 + new breaking features Of course, as others have noted, this degenerates into merging hell once 4.0 is released /Marcus On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 7:32 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Agreed. But I think shrinking the release cycle naturally will get features into usable releases more quickly solving b as well. :) On Jun 17, 2014, at 10:28 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: So there are two issues this proposal is trying to address: 1. Shrink the release cycle. 2. Backport things to stable releases. We should discuss these separately since together it's hard to discuss. 1. is less controversial I would think :) On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Totally agree — Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team…” That being said I don’t think i’m alone by identifying the problem. The proposed solution was what we came up with in the hour or so we discussed this in person. How else can you shrink the release schedule without creating another branch? Also — the idea is to only have this branch “active” during the overlap when major release branches need to stabilize. On Jun 17, 2014, at 10:03 AM, Brandon Williams dri...@gmail.com wrote: If that's what we want, merging is going to be much more painful. Currently we merge: 1.2-2.0-2.1-3.0 If we add an experimental branch for each, we still have to merge the stable branch into experiemental: 1-2-1.2ex, 2.0-2.0ex, 2.1-2.1ex, 3.0-3.0ex And then the experimentals into each other: 1.2ex-2.0ex, 2.0ex-2.1ex, 2.1ex-3.0ex That's quite a lot of merging in the end. On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure many people have the problem you are describing. This is more of a C* developer issue than a C* user issue. Is the below what you are describing we move to?: 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 stable 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 experimental Specific changes would be backported based on the less riskyness of the change which you are assuming will be constant across versions? -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have
Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means deploying/upgrading to major releases tends to be a bit more risky than between minor releases and a more involved/long running process). This means even though there are months worth of stable hard work/awesome improvements in the current “stable” major release branch (today this is 2.0), we end up with an unavoidable and undesired lag in getting more recent C* changes pushed into production. This means we are unable to provide feedback on newer changes sooner to the community, stuck and unable to get even a subset of the awesome changes as we can’t yet take ALL the changes from the new major release branch, and finally if we find an issue in production or want to work on new functionality it would be ideal if we can write it against a release that is closer to the next major release while also providing us a reasonable way to get the feature deployed internally on a branch we are running. Currently, the project generally tends to include all risky/breaking/more “feature” oriented tickets only into the next major release + trunk. However, there is a subset of these changes that are “somewhat” more risky changes but pose little/less/no risk the commit with introduce a regression outside of the scope of the patch/component. Additionally, any changes that depend on other higher risk/breaking commits/changes wouldn’t be candidates for this proposed release branch. In a perfect world we would love to target a new “interim” or “experimental” train of releases which is loosely the most stable current release train but also includes a subset of changes from the next major train. (While we were discussing we thought about possible parallels to the concept of a LTS (Long Term Support) release cycle and what some people have dubbed the “tick-tock” release cycle.) This might look something like 1.2 branch + all moderately-to-“less”-risky/non-breaking commits which currently would only end up in a 2.0 or 2.1 release. (Off the top of my head, immediately bad candidates for this build would be for changes to components such as gossip, streaming, or any patch that changes the storage format etc). This would enable the project to provide builds for more active/risk-adverse users looking for a reasonable way to get more features and changes into production than with today’s release cycle. Additionally, this would hopefully facilitate/increase quicker feedback to the project on a subset of the new major release branch and any bugs found could be reported against an actual reproducible release instead of some custom build with a given number of patches from Jira or git SHAs applied/backported.
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
Isn't this how it works now? Aka 2.0 is the I'm risk averse stable, and 2.1 is the I'm living on the edge stable __ Sent from iPhone On 17 Jun 2014, at 5:16 pm, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means deploying/upgrading to major releases tends to be a bit more risky than between minor releases and a more involved/long running process). This means even though there are months worth of stable hard work/awesome improvements in the current “stable” major release branch (today this is 2.0), we end up with an unavoidable and undesired lag in getting more recent C* changes pushed into production. This means we are unable to provide feedback on newer changes sooner to the community, stuck and unable to get even a subset of the awesome changes as we can’t yet take ALL the changes from the new major release branch, and finally if we find an issue in production or want to work on new functionality it would be ideal if we can write it against a release that is closer to the next major release while also providing us a reasonable way to get the feature deployed internally on a branch we are running. Currently, the project generally tends to include all risky/breaking/more “feature” oriented tickets only into the next major release + trunk. However, there is a subset of these changes that are “somewhat” more risky changes but pose little/less/no risk the commit with introduce a regression outside of the scope of the patch/component. Additionally, any changes that depend on other higher risk/breaking commits/changes wouldn’t be candidates for this proposed release branch. In a perfect world we would love to target a new “interim” or “experimental” train of releases which is loosely the most stable current release train but also includes a subset of changes from the next major train. (While we were discussing we thought about possible parallels to the concept of a LTS (Long Term Support) release cycle and what some people have dubbed the “tick-tock” release cycle.) This might look something like 1.2 branch + all moderately-to-“less”-risky/non-breaking commits which currently would only end up in a 2.0 or 2.1 release. (Off the top of my head, immediately bad candidates for this build would be for changes to components such as gossip, streaming, or any patch that changes the storage format etc). This would enable the project to provide builds for more active/risk-adverse users looking for a reasonable way to get more features and changes into production than with today’s
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
No, it generally takes months to reach a minor revision of the current major release to reach a release stable enough for most to use in production even if they “live on the edge. Generally there ends up being a very low number of users who've actively deployed released versions 2.0.0-2.0.5 as they too need to evaluate the build and test it in their QA/Staging environments. There are plenty of changes that went into 2.0 that are less risky that are good changes for the “I’m living on the edge” crowd sans the breaking changes and larger risky factors. (I thought i had made this clear — so I apologize I apparently didn’t). Additionally, the longer we have to deploy releases from a particular branch (while a new “stable branches matures), the farther that branch deviates from trunk. This makes it very hard for us to target development against, especially as we do everything in our power to avoid any sort of branching or running of a special or non-released build. best, michael On Jun 17, 2014, at 12:42 AM, Jacob Rhoden jacob.rho...@me.com wrote: Isn't this how it works now? Aka 2.0 is the I'm risk averse stable, and 2.1 is the I'm living on the edge stable __ Sent from iPhone On 17 Jun 2014, at 5:16 pm, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means deploying/upgrading to major releases tends to be a bit more risky than between minor releases and a more involved/long running process). This means even though there are months worth of stable hard work/awesome improvements in the current “stable” major release branch (today this is 2.0), we end up with an unavoidable and undesired lag in getting more recent C* changes pushed into production. This means we are unable to provide feedback on newer changes sooner to the community, stuck and unable to get even a subset of the awesome changes as we can’t yet take ALL the changes from the new major release branch, and finally if we find an issue in production or want to work on new functionality it would be ideal if we can write it against a release that is closer to the next major release while also providing us a reasonable way to get the feature deployed internally on a branch we are running. Currently, the project generally tends to include all risky/breaking/more “feature” oriented tickets only into the next major release + trunk. However, there is a subset of these changes that are “somewhat” more risky changes but pose little/less/no risk the commit with introduce a regression outside of the scope of the patch/component.
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means deploying/upgrading to major releases tends to be a bit more risky than between minor releases and a more involved/long running process). This means even though there are months worth of stable hard work/awesome improvements in the current “stable” major release branch (today this is 2.0), we end up with an unavoidable and undesired lag in getting more recent C* changes pushed into production. This means we are unable to provide feedback on newer changes sooner to the community, stuck and unable to get even a subset of the awesome changes as we can’t yet take ALL the changes from the new major release branch, and finally if we find an issue in production or want to work on new functionality it would be ideal if we can write it against a release that is closer to the next major release while also providing us a reasonable way to get the feature deployed internally on a branch we are running. Currently, the project generally tends to include all risky/breaking/more “feature” oriented tickets only into the next major release + trunk. However, there is a subset of these changes that are “somewhat” more risky changes but pose little/less/no risk the commit with introduce a regression outside of the scope of the patch/component. Additionally, any changes that depend on other higher risk/breaking commits/changes wouldn’t be candidates for this proposed release branch. In a perfect world we would love to target a new “interim” or “experimental” train of releases which is loosely the most stable current release train but also includes a subset of changes from the next major train. (While we were discussing we thought about possible parallels to the concept of a LTS (Long Term Support) release cycle and what some people have dubbed the “tick-tock” release cycle.) This might look something like 1.2 branch + all moderately-to-“less”-risky/non-breaking commits which currently would only end up in a 2.0 or 2.1
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means deploying/upgrading to major releases tends to be a bit more risky than between minor releases and a more involved/long running process). This means even though there are months worth of stable hard work/awesome improvements in the current “stable” major release branch (today this is 2.0), we end up with an unavoidable and undesired lag in getting more recent C* changes pushed into production. This means we are unable to provide feedback on newer changes sooner to the community, stuck and unable to get even a subset of the awesome changes as we can’t yet take ALL the changes from the new major release branch, and finally if we find an issue in production or want to work on new functionality it would be ideal if we can write it against a release that is closer to the next
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
I'm not sure many people have the problem you are describing. This is more of a C* developer issue than a C* user issue. Is the below what you are describing we move to?: 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 stable 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 experimental Specific changes would be backported based on the less riskyness of the change which you are assuming will be constant across versions? -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means deploying/upgrading to major releases tends to be a bit more risky than between minor releases and a more involved/long running process). This means even though there are months worth of stable hard work/awesome improvements in the current
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
If that's what we want, merging is going to be much more painful. Currently we merge: 1.2-2.0-2.1-3.0 If we add an experimental branch for each, we still have to merge the stable branch into experiemental: 1-2-1.2ex, 2.0-2.0ex, 2.1-2.1ex, 3.0-3.0ex And then the experimentals into each other: 1.2ex-2.0ex, 2.0ex-2.1ex, 2.1ex-3.0ex That's quite a lot of merging in the end. On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure many people have the problem you are describing. This is more of a C* developer issue than a C* user issue. Is the below what you are describing we move to?: 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 stable 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 experimental Specific changes would be backported based on the less riskyness of the change which you are assuming will be constant across versions? -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
I agree — but there are lots of people though who lag in adoption while waiting for more “risky” or “breaking” changes to shake out/stabilize that want to continue deploying newer fixes. No? On Jun 17, 2014, at 9:51 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure many people have the problem you are describing. This is more of a C* developer issue than a C* user issue. Is the below what you are describing we move to?: 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 stable 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 experimental Specific changes would be backported based on the less riskyness of the change which you are assuming will be constant across versions? -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent Cassandra releases. The current cycle has resulted in currently “active” branches for 1.2, 2.0, 2.1, and +3.0. Official stable releases are from 2.0, beta’s/RC’s from 2.1, and there is the potential for another out-of-band 1.2/previous stable release build. We would love to always run the current “stable” release in production but generally/historically it takes time and a few minor releases to the current “major” branch stable to get to a state where we can accept for use in production. Additionally, as major releases are currently used to make “breaking” changes that require a more involved and risky upgrade process, it’s a much bigger deal to deploy a new major into production than a release without breaking changes. (upgrade-sstables for example is required when upgrading to a new major release branch. this unavoidable step adds lots of temporary load to the cluster and means
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
Totally agree — Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team…” That being said I don’t think i’m alone by identifying the problem. The proposed solution was what we came up with in the hour or so we discussed this in person. How else can you shrink the release schedule without creating another branch? Also — the idea is to only have this branch “active” during the overlap when major release branches need to stabilize. On Jun 17, 2014, at 10:03 AM, Brandon Williams dri...@gmail.com wrote: If that's what we want, merging is going to be much more painful. Currently we merge: 1.2-2.0-2.1-3.0 If we add an experimental branch for each, we still have to merge the stable branch into experiemental: 1-2-1.2ex, 2.0-2.0ex, 2.1-2.1ex, 3.0-3.0ex And then the experimentals into each other: 1.2ex-2.0ex, 2.0ex-2.1ex, 2.1ex-3.0ex That's quite a lot of merging in the end. On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure many people have the problem you are describing. This is more of a C* developer issue than a C* user issue. Is the below what you are describing we move to?: 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 stable 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 experimental Specific changes would be backported based on the less riskyness of the change which you are assuming will be constant across versions? -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new major release. Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team... The Longer Story: Last week I had a conversation with a few people regarding a proposed change to the current C* release schedule. Other than an attempt to make Jonathan and Sylvian’s lives more difficult, it would be ideal if we could better sync our internal release schedule with more recent
Re: Proposed changes to C* Release Schedule
Agreed. But I think shrinking the release cycle naturally will get features into usable releases more quickly solving b as well. :) On Jun 17, 2014, at 10:28 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: So there are two issues this proposal is trying to address: 1. Shrink the release cycle. 2. Backport things to stable releases. We should discuss these separately since together it's hard to discuss. 1. is less controversial I would think :) On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Totally agree — Also — i’m aware that any additional branches/releases will add additional work for any developer that works on C*. It would be great if we could strike a balance that hopefully doesn’t add significant additional merging/rebasing/work for the team…” That being said I don’t think i’m alone by identifying the problem. The proposed solution was what we came up with in the hour or so we discussed this in person. How else can you shrink the release schedule without creating another branch? Also — the idea is to only have this branch “active” during the overlap when major release branches need to stabilize. On Jun 17, 2014, at 10:03 AM, Brandon Williams dri...@gmail.com wrote: If that's what we want, merging is going to be much more painful. Currently we merge: 1.2-2.0-2.1-3.0 If we add an experimental branch for each, we still have to merge the stable branch into experiemental: 1-2-1.2ex, 2.0-2.0ex, 2.1-2.1ex, 3.0-3.0ex And then the experimentals into each other: 1.2ex-2.0ex, 2.0ex-2.1ex, 2.1ex-3.0ex That's quite a lot of merging in the end. On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not sure many people have the problem you are describing. This is more of a C* developer issue than a C* user issue. Is the below what you are describing we move to?: 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 stable 1.2 - 2.0 - 2.1 - 3.0 experimental Specific changes would be backported based on the less riskyness of the change which you are assuming will be constant across versions? -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:28 PM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: It's a bit about features - but it's more an attempt to achieve the goals of what might happen with a 4 week release cycle (but that itself -- in practice didn't prove to be valid/reasonable). If something like an executor service for performance is changed (for example) it is definitely a more risky change than what would currently go into 1.2 -- but most likely we would want to get patches like that into a usable build. So I guess: a) reduce code drift between branches we run in production b) get newer features into production faster where breaking changes aren't required for the scope of the patch. Additionally - it's also a question of what release we use when we identify an issue we want to work on internally. If we are on 1.2 because we can't yet take ALL of 2.0 - do we now need to target our work against 1.2? I would rather write it against the months worth of changes that have happened since. Finally, it's an attempt to make the internal forking not as common as it might be today. As you said - this is somewhat of a common process. On Jun 17, 2014, at 8:52 AM, Jake Luciani jak...@gmail.com wrote Hi Michael, I didn't get to hear the in person conversation so taking a step back. The proposal seems to be in response to a common problem. i.e. I'm on C* version X and I need feature Y which is only available on version Z. Is this correct? The options have been: a) upgrade to version Z or b) fork C* and backport. Coming my my previous job where I ran a prod C* cluster I felt this and I expect many others do too. We did have to fork and backport patches we needed and it was hard. This is specific to features and not bugs, since bugs are fixed in all versions affected. -Jake On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 3:16 AM, Michael Kjellman mkjell...@internalcircle.com wrote: Hi Dev@ List— TL;DR: I’d love it if we could modify the C* release cycle to include an additional “experimental” release branch that straddles the current major releases that includes somewhat “untested” or “risky” commits that normally would only go into the next major release. Releases based from this branch wouldn’t contain any features that require breaking changes or are considered highly “untested” or “risky” but would include the many other commits that today are considered too unsafe to put into the previous stable branch. This will allow us to run code closer to the current stable release branch when we are unable to move fully to the new major release branch. Also, during the release cycle of the next major release branch the project can get feedback from a subset of the total changes that will ultimately make it into that final new
