Good morning,

It is time of a release cycle:

The owner of this cycle is  Peng Tao

https://github.com/kata-containers/community/wiki/Release-Team-Rota

Please feel free to ask other community members to work with you as 3 releases are a lot for one person,  feel free to ask help to Review team of this week to accelerate the merge process or debug/identify flaky tests.

As a  tip based in previous experiences, It is nice to have one  person helping per branch make easier the process but still the release owner has to pay attention in the general organization of the release team. If anyone from the kata community want to get involved in the release process feel free to volunteer here to help Peng Tao with this release cycle.

Here the release instructions:

https://github.com/kata-containers/packaging/blob/master/release/release.md

Feel free to improve or fix the release process as you face issues during the process.

Note: this week is scheduled the first release candidate for Kata 1.7, that means after the release not new features will be included and just bug fixes will be added . If you feel that it is still needed to include something for this release ask to delay the release candidate and ask for another alpha or wait for the next release cycle (kata 1.8-alpha0).

Carlos