Support for testing against Istio Alpha/RC releases

[jshaughn]

The Kiali project had been using istioctl to install Istio in our nightly CI. The CI runs against the most recent Istio release, N, N-1 and N-2. So, for example, if 1.26 RC0 is released, the CI picks it up automatically and we proceed to run Kiali head against 1.26 RC0, and the latest release of 1.25 and 1.24.

We recently migrated from istioctl to Sail (we love Sail), but now face the issue of not having a Sail release that installs the latest Istio release (1.26 RC0 in the example above). I think Sail CI tests against Istio head, is there a nightly release that we should be using? Is there an imminent Sail release after each Istio release? What do you advise?

[nrfox]

To add some more context, Kiali, in CI, currently installs Sail via the latest stable helm release. Stable Sail releases strip out the RC versions of Istio. So to test RC versions of Istio with Sail, either Kiali can install Sail from the main branch instead of the latest stable helm release or Sail could do RC releases that include RC releases of Istio and Kiali can install the latest RC release of Sail.

[fjglira]

I think installing from master will be the easiest option to ensure that you are using the RC version. The only downside of this is that we are not constantly updating the alpha version in the versions.yaml, for example, we currently have:

- name: master
    ref: v1.27-alpha.af4d964e
  - name: v1.27-alpha.af4d964e
    version: 1.27-alpha.af4d964e0192748314850ac2f929270ce09afad6
    repo: https://github.com/istio/istio
    branch: master
    commit: af4d964e0192748314850ac2f929270ce09afad6

And this commit is from 15 days ago. So, to be able to ensure that Kiali installs the latest commit from master, we need to ensure that we update the master version daily in the versions.yaml

The second alternative from @nrfox (creating RC releases of Sail) is also a good option, but we will need the daily update of the versions.yaml also. So, for both options, we need to figure out the best way to update this specific master istio version to avoid putting new Istio versions (that we don't want to add yet) beside the master branch's latest commit

[fjglira]

I think if you all agree, we can move this to an issue and start checking if it is possible to only update daily the master branch commit for the master version in the versions.yaml file.

[jshaughn]

+1, do we have an issue created?

[fjglira]

No, but we can transfer this discussion into an issue. I'll do it

[fjglira]

Here is the issue now #813

[fjglira]

More comments on the issue. Hi @jshaughn it's possible to now install the master latest commit using the sail operator from master, but we need to discuss the best way to do this for RC builds. Closing this discussion and moving it to the issue