Stop Windows Releases

[hakman]

Windows support was never fully finished, based on #461.
At the moment, Windows releases require additional effort to automate and may need more effort with Windows ARM support.

Is there any interest in continuing building the Windows support and releasing new Windows binaries?

CC @SergeyKanzhelev @wangzhen127

[wangzhen127]

We are currently not investing more into Windows. But if you plan to invest into it, I am happy to support.

[hakman]

We are currently not investing more into Windows. But if you plan to invest into it, I am happy to support.

Sorry, maybe I was not very clear. I don't see much value in releasing the Windows binaries. I would like to make the release simpler and be based on the images published to staging, but those are Linux only.

Sure, having them in the makefile and building them is good and insures we don't break them. No objections there. But we don't test with Windows nodes, we just release some (hopefully) working binaries.

[wangzhen127]

Oh, I see. Yeah, I think it's fine to clean up and remove the windows binaries if no one is depending on it. I am not even sure if the released windows binary works or not. @SergeyKanzhelev Do you have any visibility here?

[wangzhen127]

I just realized that GKE actually sets up NPD on windows node pools. So it would still be good to keep releasing windows binaries.

[SergeyKanzhelev]

I would expect that there are more users than just GKE. For Windows we may decide to limit support to only build binaries and let vendors who need containers do it themselves.

[SergeyKanzhelev]

Also summoning @marosset - do you use NPD in AKS Windows nodes?

[marosset]

Also summoning @marosset - do you use NPD in AKS Windows nodes?

AKS only uses NPD for Linux nodes.

[SergeyKanzhelev]

Also summoning @marosset - do you use NPD in AKS Windows nodes?

AKS only uses NPD for Linux nodes.

Are there any particular reasons for this? Any interest to pick it up for Windows nodes?

[zylxjtu]

We will double check with AKS team, and I think we will still prefer to release windows binaries if possible

[SergeyKanzhelev]

@hakman is the biggest difficulty with the Windows is building an image? I would think we can limit the Windows to just a binary release if this will significantly simplify release. Completely removing Windows support feels like a major scope change (deprecation) and I am not comfortable deciding on it without wider discussion and analysis performed as well as marking the feature as deprecated for a few releases.

[marosset]

I can also help out if there are any issues with building images and/or binaries for this project.
Let me know what - if any pain points there are!

[hakman]

Let me try to explain:
Automating only publishing the binaries it's actually a harder to solve problem with the k8s org tools that I'm aware of.
For images there is a pretty straightforward process that can be completed without any special permissions. Once the images are published to registry.k8s.io, they become the source of through. The binaries can be extracted from the images with a simple script and published by any maintainer. It's pretty easy to check that hashes match between the binaries in the published images and those from the GitHub release.
At least this is what I am trying to get to.

In this context, there are no windows images (at least not yet). If it sounds reasonable, we could try to create some Windows images to use in the same way. Shouldn't be so hard, but I am not sure if multi-arch images can be easily created to include Windows targets or if separate images should be created.

[marosset]

Let me try to explain: Automating only publishing the binaries it's actually a harder to solve problem with the k8s org tools that I'm aware of. For images there is a pretty straightforward process that can be completed without any special permissions. Once the images are published to registry.k8s.io, they become the source of through. The binaries can be extracted from the images with a simple script and published by any maintainer. It's pretty easy to check that hashes match between the binaries in the published images and those from the GitHub release. At least this is what I am trying to get to.

In this context, there are no windows images (at least not yet). If it sounds reasonable, we could try to create some Windows images to use in the same way. Shouldn't be so hard, but I am not sure if multi-arch images can be easily created to include Windows targets or if separate images should be created.

I see.
Let's just create images.

We can create multi-arch images that include both Windows and Linux images.

The CSI drivers are have some good examples to follow https://github.com/kubernetes-csi/node-driver-registrar/blob/master/release-tools/build.make

@hakman - I can help out here if you'd like