This release is scheduled for: Monday 6 November 2023.

Pre-Release

• Update the query serving compatibility page on the website
• Notify the community on Slack.
• Add the Backport to: release-18.0 label
• Make sure the release notes summary is prepared and clean
• Move items in the release notes so that important things are on top
• Clean up deprecated flags
• Draft the blog post
• Review blog post
• Create a PR for the blog post on the website repository
• Test the operator examples with the latest version of vitess-operator
• Make sure everyone in the release team has access to the Maven release website
• Prepare cross-posting of blogpost:
  • Vitess.io
  • PlanetScale
  • CNCF
• Backport PRs to verify
  • [release-18.0] VDiff tablet selection: pick non-serving tablets in Reshard workflows (#14413) #14418
  • [release-18.0] servenv: Remove double close() logic (#14457) #14459
  • [release-18.0] VReplication: Handle multiple streams in UpdateVReplicationWorkflow RPC (#14447) #14468
• Must Fix issues
  • Bug Report: v18.0.0-rc1 S3 backup failed to upload #14188
  • VDiff: "show all" should only report vdiffs for the specified keyspace and workflow #14442
  • Bug Report: UpdateVReplicationWorkflow tablet RPC only updates one stream #14446
  • Bug Report: viper dynamic config does not work #14452
  • Bug Report: vttablet panic on shutdown #14458
• Vitess Operator backport PRs to verify before release of the operator
• Follow code-freeze/pre-release instructions from release documentation
• Create final release PRs

Release

• Follow the release instructions for release: here
• Continue with the Java release following these instructions.
• On the Vitess website repository, make sure the docs are updated
• Merge the 18.0.0 release notes on main
• Make sure arewefastyet benchmarks the new release (https://benchmark.vitess.io/status)
• Release the operator, v2.11.0.
• Build and push the k8s images
  • Vitess
  • Vitess Operator

Post-Release

• Notify the community on Slack.
• Make sure the Java release is available
• Make sure the blog post is published on:
  • PlanetScale
  • CNCF
  • vitess.io
• Benchmarking results
• Tweet both vitess release and operator release