We want to deprecate today's debian-based container-vm image, and switch to GCI image by default. Before we do that, we need to validate the image using Kubernetes testing infrastructure. GCI image has three different release channels: dev, beta, and stable. Besides that they also build ci release nightly. Today we already run the the following jenkins jobs against each image release:

• kubernetes-gce-e2e,
• kubernetes-gce-e2e-slow,
• kubernetes-gce-e2e-serial

But we are missing kubernetes-gce-e2e-soak, kubernetes-gce-e2e-scalability, probably also kubernetes-gce-e2e-upgrade (? not sure how to handle this since it is the first release), and kubernetes-gce-e2e-features.

We also need to include gci image to node-e2e test suite too.

Next step we should to identify the critical builds for gci to block merge-bot.

Eventually, we can switch GCI image as the default image on GCE, but keep debian-based container-vm image testing until we can deprecate it.

@andyzheng0831 and @wonderfly are going to write detail plan on this.

cc/ @roberthbailey from GKE side.
cc/ @mansoorj from PM side