How to Turn Release Management from Duty to Fun: Lessons Learned Building the Cluster API Release Team

Release management has always been a tedious process. Not anymore! A handful of folks, always the same, when free from other tasks, were cutting Cluster API releases for all the active branches. This was not good! Enter the Cluster API team! Want to know how the ClusterAPI project was able to deliver frequent and predictable release cadence? Want to learn how the release team made working on the release tasks satisfying and a fun learning experience for many different contributors? Come to this talk and we will share insights on how we created a ClusterAPI release team by taking inspiration from the Kubernetes release team and shrank it to a more appropriate scale for the project, what we learned from our first venture in running a release team, the problems we solved and other problems we have our sights on, and how this work had an immediate and positive impact on the community, the users of the project and the members of the release team itself!