SKA Release and Deployment Flow

The release and deployment flow for a project has many uncertainties at the moment regarding deployment process, ci/cd flow, configuration management and deployment responsibilities. This coupled with the lack of usage of existing tooling available makes it hard for teams and the project the align on a unified approach. This features tries to address this with below mindset:

In the last months/year(s) many CICD tools have been prepared and shared with teams by ST and !# but not many of them have been used (digested) by teams (examples are the k8s tango operator or the shared environment). The result is that when a change is made into a component repository, the continuous integration of it with other components is not really happening anywhere (i.e. skampi not updated, tests not aligned)

• The unified approach  for Software CI/CD, release and deployment are implemented to increase the frequency integration cycle

• The approach is used with OMC/DP teams in a co-located shared sessions to move them to the process while educating the teams
• The selected teams should be able to integrate/release a change in a day at the end
• Missing/unclear documentation from the sessions are highlighted and fed into SP-3703

It is now possible to deploy to the ITF envrinmoent from Gitlab pipeline jobs.

See the deployment procedure here :https://gitlab.com/ska-telescope/ska-dish-lmc/-/pipelines/1078212310 , specifically the `deploy-lmc-to-itf-karoo-sims` stage as an example.

Sample deployment (Dish.LMC + Karoo simulators) is available here: https://k8s.miditf.internal.skao.int/miditf-lmc-003-karoo-sims/taranta/devices