Vitess Release v21 Tracking Issue

[rohit-nayak-ps]

Feature Description

This is a tracking issue for the upcoming release of Vitess 21. Aims to hos pending todos and further document the process.
21.0 Team: Rohit (Release Manager), Shlomi (Previous RM), Florent (Release Wizard and Next RM)
Clarification: The vitess-releaser is automates most of the release process including creating release-related PRs. This PR is a complement to it, for tracking progress and ongoing issues/todos, but it will not be used by the tool.

Backports for v21 RC2

• [Direct PR] [release-21.0] Revert Errant GTID detection in vttablets #17019
• [Direct PR] [release-21.0] Augment PrimaryStatus to also send Server UUID #17032
• [release-21.0] Fix the release workflow (#16964) #17020
• [release-21.0] VReplication: Support reversing read-only traffic in vtctldclient (#16920) #17015
• [release-21.0] VReplication: Restore previous minimal e2e test behavior (#17016) #17017
• [release-21.0] fix: Infinite logs in case of non-existent stream logs (#17004) #17014
• [release-21.0] [Direct PR] bugfix: add HAVING columns inside derived tables (#16976) #16980
• [release-21.0] [Direct PR] fix: route engine to handle column truncation for execute after lookup (#16981) #16986
• [release-21.0] Add missing changelog for PR #16852 (#17002) #17006
• [release-21.0] Fix deadlock between health check and topology watcher (#16995) #17010
• [release-21.0] fix releasing the global read lock when mysqlshell backup fails (#17000) #17012
• [release-21.0] [Direct PR] Add RPC to read the reparent journal position #16982

Todos

• During RC-2 update the code examples of the vtop release-2.14 branch to use rc2
• Generate Cobra Docs manually
• CNCF Blog Post final Google Docs (by 18 Oct)
• Summary verification (by Deepthi by 25 Oct)
• Update vitess-releaser for cobradocs generation: pre-release
• Update vitess-releaser checklist for vttestserver image generation: post-release
• Update vitess-releaser checklist for removing Bypass Protection from vitess repo: post-release
• Add to vitess-releaser checklist for verifying that /releases artifacts are created: post-release
• Add to vitess-releaser checklist for GA to message CNCF about blog post (already there?)
• Announce on OSS Slack, upcoming code freeze and release two weeks before code freeze: https://vitess.slack.com/archives/C0PQY0PTK/p1727123807991129
• Vitess Releaser changes for v21 Initial set of changes for v21 release vitess-releaser#112
• Announcement on OSS Slack two days before code freeze
• Deepthi to check release notes Oct 2nd
• CNCF Blog Post initial

(Potential) Backports for v21 RC1

• [release-21.0] Fix flag name typo from #16852 (#16921) #16923
• [release-21.0] fix issue with json unmarshalling of operators with space in them #16933
• [release-21.0] VTGate MoveTables Buffering: Fix panic when buffering is disabled (#16922) #16936
• [release-21.0] Bump commons-io:commons-io from 2.7 to 2.14.0 in /java (#16889) #16932
• [release-2.14] Support customisation of docker images per-keyspace planetscale/vitess-operator#613

Issues to Merge before RC code freeze

• Making Reshard work smoothly with Atomic Transactions #16844
• copy editing changes to summary #16880
• Fix: Errant GTID detection on the replicas when they set replication source #16833
• VReplication: Support automatically replacing auto_inc cols with sequences #16860
• Fix race in replicationLagModule of go/vt/throttle #16078
• MySQL errors: ERInnodbIndexCorrupt #16851
• VTTablet: smartconnpool: notify all expired waiters #16897
• Query serving: incorporate mirror query results in log stats, fix mirror query max lag bug #16879
• Add blurb about experimental 8.4 support #16886
• Errant GTID Counts metric in VTOrc #16829
• Move concurrent connection dial limit out of healthcheck. #16378
• Add ChangeTabletTags RPC to vtctl, ChangeTags RPC to vttablet #16857

Stuff to add to summary.md

• atomic transactions
• mysql 8.4 support

Release artifacts

The goal of a Vitess release is to generate the following artifacts for every release including GA and intermediate RCs (and subsequent patches).

1. A git hash that marks the commit at which the release is cut.
2. Vitess binary and operator Images should be pushed to Docker Hub: should be visible at https://hub.docker.com/u/vitess like https://hub.docker.com/r/vitess/lite/tags?name=v20
3. Java packages to be pushed to Maven/SonaType
4. Notifications to Twitter/Slack
5. CNCF Blog post
6. Updated vitess.io Website documentation

Prep Work

• Monitor PRs that need to go into the release from a few days before
• Validate release notes

Dates

Tentative dates, pending schedule alignment:

• Before October 8: Pre-Requisites for a release (check environment, check GH rights, check release notes, etc)
• Tuesday 8 October: release-21.0 Code Freeze (Zoom Meeting needed)
• Between the 8th and 14h: v21.0.0 RC-1 Pre-Requisites
• Monday 14 October: v21.0.0 RC-1 Pre-Release (Zoom Meeting needed)
• Tuesday 15 October: v21.0.0 RC-1 Release (Zoom Meeting needed)
• Monday 21 October: v21.0.0 RC-2 Pre-Release (optional) (Zoom Meeting needed)
• Tuesday 22 October: v21.0.0 RC-2 Release (optional) (Zoom Meeting needed)
• Between the 22nd and 28h: v21.0.0 GA Pre-Requisites
• Monday 28 October: v21.0.0 GA Pre-Release (Zoom Meeting needed)
• Tuesday 29 October: v21.0.0 GA Release (Zoom Meeting needed)

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