Deprecations went unnoticed leading to a blocker of auto-deployments
Problem Statement
Incident: production#9091 (closed)
With the switch to version 16 for the auto-deploy version after the most recent version 15.11 release, auto-deploy began failing because omnibus refused to install due to deprecations that have been around since at least version 15.9.
The Delivery team watches out for these prior to each monthly release. These should've been noticed starting around version 15.10. This is a manual step in our monthly release procedure: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools/-/blob/master/templates/monthly.md.erb#L20
Which for 15.10 and 15.11, were ticked without any comment indicating that we were in danger. So where are we insufficient in this check?
Reference:
- gitlab-org/release/tasks#5286 (comment 1325348960)
- gitlab-org/release/tasks#5119 (comment 1289971843)
Solution
Determine if our manual procedure is insufficient and create a runbook to help identify deprecations appropriately. Create an issue to determine if any learnings could be automated to trigger action within our team. The end goal being that we prevent blocking ourselves if deprecations have begun being announced.