Hi all, We in the Ceph Steering Committee are discussing when we want to target the Tentacle release for, as we find ourselves in an unusual scheduling situation: * Historically, we have targeted our major release in early Spring. I believe this was initially aligned to the Ubuntu LTS release. (With cephadm and containerization I'm not sure this is particularly relevant any more?) * Unfortunately, due to issues in the sepia lab and with testing infrastructure, we had big slips on Reef (August), and we tried to get Squid back on track but it ended up slipping farther (September). * The sepia lab needs to physically move this year out of the current Red Hat community hosting area in to a new lab (hosted by IBM). We're not sure how disruptive this will be, but it will definitely require changes as our current tests are somewhat dependent on the shape of the underlying hardware, which is changing. * There are not many major features available yet. Major upcoming features include the fast EC code, userspace and management support for cephfs encryption, and RBD mirroring groups. Different parts of these are coming throughout the calendar year but we don't have firm timetables yet. We have basically discarded attempting to do an early spring release, since there doesn't seem to be much point. The obvious options are 1) Do a fall release, targeting 12 months after Squid (so, late September, with a freeze in early July). 2) Wait until early spring 2026, with a freeze in January. (This doesn't preclude other options as we gather more input, but we are starting with these for discussion.) We are soliciting feedback on the impact these options will have on our various downstreams and direct upstream consumers. The CSC's *early and tentative* preference is for spring 2026, for the following reasons: 1) the sepia lab move is going to involve an unknown amount of development, and we are gunshy after issues the last couple years. 2) While there is feature work in development, we are unsure how much of interest will be both ready to freeze by mid-summer, and not suitable for backport to our stable releases. 3) Fall releases seem awkward with many organizations wanting to freeze infrastructure over the holidays. 4) While the data is conflicting, it seems like deployments are lagging more on major-version upgrades and so a longer release cycle may make future updates easier for everyone. If the Ceph release schedule has a large impact on your organization or planning, please let us know your thoughts and forward to your downstreams. :) Thanks! -The Ceph Steering Committee, by way of Greg