End of Life v2

[mattfarina]

The end of support for Helm v2 is approaching. This issue is here to cover the details we need to do as part of the EOL process.

Changes to v2:

• Provide a flag skip adding stable as it will no longer be available. Skip adding stable/incubator on init flag #7868
• Provide a new download location for Tiller? The Google Cloud location will likely be turned off. While not required, this could provide for fewer support requests. Make Tiller Image Available on Docker Hub #8346

Documentation Changes:

• Add a notice to the v2 docs page that support has ended.
• Update installation docs for the new situation to alleviate some support requests
• Remove v2 from the version menu?

Notify The Community:

• Blog post when bug fix EOL has happened with timelines and guidance
• Blog post when EOL has happened

Clean-up:

• Close v2 issues

[bridgetkromhout]

Remove v2 from the version menu?

Since we know there will be people trying to self-support v2, seems like keeping the (unmaintained, non-updated) docs would be a kindness? That would prevent them from having to go to github or the wayback machine. If we want to clean them up we can generate the final v2 version and drop the static files in the helm-www repo so helm/helm no longer has to be involved.

[bacongobbler]

Playing devil's advocate here, "Keeping the documentation around as a kindness" implies that we are committing to the community that - should the site go down - we will bring it back up. That to me sounds like support.

If there are users out there that still wish to use software that is no longer supported, it should be up to them to maintain the project, and because the Helm project is open source, the source code is freely available and they're free to run their own fork of the documentation.

On the other hand, netlify's services have been free (so far), and the site nearly never goes down, so the amount of overhead required to keep the site up is nearly zero.

I think a middle-ground stance is nice here:

• remove v2 from the version menu on https://helm.sh
• keep https://v2.helm.sh up

That way users can still reach Helm 2's documentation should they choose to do so.

Should we choose to keep the site up, I think we should make it very clear to the community that this is a "kindness" effort, and the site may be taken down at any point after November 2020. Our stance has been quite clear up to this point that Helm maintainers are not going to support Helm 2 after its active support cycle is finished.

The same could be argued for both the Tiller download location as well as the Helm CLI downloads.

The point I'm trying to make here is that by keeping things around (sites, downloads, etc.) without clearly stating these assets can be removed at any point sets a very dangerous precedent. I think it's unfair for a foundation (CNCF) and the project's maintainers to keep paying and maintaining services well after a product has past its own support life cycle.

For example, it costs the CNCF thousands of dollars per month to support the current Helm 2 downloads (we're sitting at around 2M+ downloads of Helm 2 + Helm 3 per month). How long will the CNCF allow us to keep spending that much on a product we no longer support?

[mattfarina]

In the new download location for Tiller area we have looked at Docker Hub who has recently changed their direction. Should we use GitHub registry instead?

[marckhouzam]

In the new download location for Tiller area we have looked at Docker Hub who has recently changed their direction.

What are you referring to exactly as a change of direction? I fear I have missed some big news 😨

[marckhouzam]

Ok, I just saw that Docker Hub is introducing a 6-month retention policy for the free plan for images that have not been pulled or pushed:
https://hub.docker.com/pricing

[hickeyma]

FYI, CNCF position on new Docker policy limiting image retention.

The much bigger issue seems to be the "free" image/user pull limits rather than the image retention: cncf/foundation#106 (comment)

[hickeyma]

Thanks @estesp for pointing me #8343 (comment) ^^

[rsicart]

Hi,
is that normal that https://charts.helm.sh/stable/index.yaml still contains references to deprecated stable repo https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/ ?

[bacongobbler]

For the moment, yes. AFAIK the chart maintainers are still working on rewriting the URLs in the index and are working on a migration plan in preparation for Nov 13th.

[bacongobbler]

For reference, this information is embedded in the charts themselves so they need to be updated to the correct location.

For example: https://github.com/helm/charts/blob/b9278fa98cef543f5473eb55160eaf45833bc74e/stable/airflow/requirements.yaml#L4

[rsicart]

Given that this repo should not be updated anymore I suppose,
doing a sed to replace old urls by new repo url would do the trick ?

[bacongobbler]

opened helm/charts#23971 to track this work.

[github-actions]

This issue has been marked as stale because it has been open for 90 days with no activity. This thread will be automatically closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs.