Changing the release cadence

Hi everyone, Since luminous, we have had the follow release cadence and policy: - release every 9 months - maintain backports for the last two releases - enable upgrades to move either 1 or 2 releases heads (e.g., luminous -> mimic or nautilus; mimic -> nautilus or octopus; ...) This has mostly worked out well, except that the mimic release received less attention that we wanted due to the fact that multiple downstream Ceph products (from Red Has and SUSE) decided to based their next release on nautilus. Even though upstream every release is an "LTS" release, as a practical matter mimic got less attention than luminous or nautilus. We've had several requests/proposals to shift to a 12 month cadence. This has several advantages: - Stable/conservative clusters only have to be upgraded every 2 years (instead of every 18 months) - Yearly releases are more likely to intersect with downstream distribution release (e.g., Debian). In the past there have been problems where the Ceph releases included in consecutive releases of a distro weren't easily upgradeable. - Vendors that make downstream Ceph distributions/products tend to release yearly. Aligning with those vendors means they are more likely to productize *every* Ceph release. This will help make every Ceph release an "LTS" release (not just in name but also in terms of maintenance attention). So far the balance of opinion seems to favor a shift to a 12 month cycle[1], especially among developers, so it seems pretty likely we'll make that shift. (If you do have strong concerns about such a move, now is the time to raise them.) That brings us to an important decision: what time of year should we release? Once we pick the timing, we'll be releasing at that time *every year* for each release (barring another schedule shift, which we want to avoid), so let's choose carefully! A few options: - November: If we release Octopus 9 months from the Nautilus release (planned for Feb, released in Mar) then we'd target this November. We could shift to a 12 months candence after that. - February: That's 12 months from the Nautilus target. - March: That's 12 months from when Nautilus was *actually* released. November is nice in the sense that we'd wrap things up before the holidays. It's less good in that users may not be inclined to install the new release when many developers will be less available in December. February kind of sucked in that the scramble to get the last few things done happened during the holidays. OTOH, we should be doing what we can to avoid such scrambles, so that might not be something we should factor in. March may be a bit more balanced, with a solid 3 months before when people are productive, and 3 months after before they disappear on holiday to address any post-release issues. People tend to be somewhat less available over the summer months due to holidays etc, so an early or late summer release might also be less than ideal. Thoughts? If we can narrow it down to a few options maybe we could do a poll to gauge user preferences. Thanks! sage [1] https://twitter.com/larsmb/status/1130010208971952129