v1.4.0 Release-Cycle: API Review, Release Candidates & Testing

[shaneutt]

The API Refinement and Documentation Phase for Release v1.4.0 has concluded. We're now in the final stretch before the final release where we'll be doing continue review, testing, and publishing RCs.

As a reminder the following features have moved to Standard:

• GEP: TLS from Gateway to Backend for ingress (backend TLS termination) #1897
• GEP: SupportedFeatures #3164
• GEP: Add Name to HTTPRouteRule and HTTPRouteMatch #995

And these have moved to Experimental:

• Mesh Resource Definition #3949
• GEP: Default Gateways #3793
• GEP: Gateway/HTTPRoute level authentication #1494 (special iteration)
• GEP: Client Certificate Verification for Gateway Listeners #91 (special iteration)

Note: The "special iterations" above indicate items that are either only partially moving forward, were already far along in status, or have some other special circumstance that brought them in scope.

Implementers: During this phase, please run and generate reports for the conformance tests for the above features if your implementation intends to support them. We need feedback and reports for conformance tests from several implementations prior to the final release, as this helps with final confidence in the delivery. Please feel free to share feedback about conformance directly in this announcement as comments.

We will post updates here about release candidates, so please subscribe to this announcement for continued updates to stay tuned.

If you have questions, comments or concerns about this part of the release cycle or you need support with any of the features in this release: this thread is a great place to comment, ask for help and check in!

[shaneutt]

Due to some timing issues that cropped up due to our need to provide extensions this release, as well as some timing issues around API review, we're not actually quite ready to cut an initial RC tag. We've created a release branch which includes all the current changes:

https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/gateway-api/tree/release-1.4

For the purposes of testing and reporting, please consider this "RC-like" as it is highly representative of what the first tag will be. We would appreciate testing and feedback on it from implementations. API review feedback changes and some final maintenance changes (notably, BackendTLSPolicy spec and tests are complete, but we need to move it to v1) will be ported into this branch, and we'll start cutting our RC tags directly from this branch.

Please send any testing feedback, questions, etc about this as a reply to this comment, thank you! 🖖