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Delete the orphaned ci/k8s-beta.txt marker in gs://k8s-release-dev #9814

Description

@dims

What

gs://k8s-release-dev/ci/k8s-beta.txt is frozen. No job writes it any more, so it will point at a 1.36 build forever and get staler every day.

Please delete the object.

Current state

$ gsutil cat gs://k8s-release-dev/ci/k8s-beta.txt
v1.36.3-17+e460e27c50dd60          # last written 2026-08-08T01:34:04Z

All markers in that prefix:

Object Value Last written Writer
ci/k8s-beta.txt v1.36.3-17+e460e27c50dd60 2026-08-08 none
ci/k8s-stable1.txt v1.35.7-7+9d6e640ac26344 2026-08-08 ci-kubernetes-build-1-36
ci/k8s-stable2.txt v1.34.10-4+4c074912963515 2026-08-07 ci-kubernetes-build-1-35
ci/k8s-stable3.txt v1.33.13-3+b6c43fca069b5f 2026-06-17 ci-kubernetes-build-1-34
ci/k8s-master.txt none (404, already gone)

The stable1/stable2/stable3 values still show the pre-rotation state because those branches have not published since the config change. They will catch up on their next build. k8s-beta will not.

Why it is orphaned

krel ci-build writes these through --extra-version-markers. Until the 1.37 branch cut, ci-kubernetes-build-1-36 carried --extra-version-markers=k8s-beta, which is what wrote the current value.

kubernetes/test-infra@2be1092a77 ("Generate v1.37 testgrid jobs", 2026-08-08) rotated the markers down one release:

Branch job --extra-version-markers
ci-kubernetes-build-1-34 k8s-stable3
ci-kubernetes-build-1-35 k8s-stable2
ci-kubernetes-build-1-36 k8s-stable1 (was k8s-beta)
ci-kubernetes-build-1-37 (none)

No job passes k8s-beta any more.

Why delete rather than leave it

A reader of k8s-beta.txt gets a well-formed version string that looks current. It is pinned to 1.36 and will never move. A silent wrong answer is worse than a 404, and ci/k8s-master.txt already 404s, so consumers must already handle a missing marker.

I found no consumer of this object in kubernetes/test-infra. Worth a second pair of eyes on consumers outside that repo before deleting.

Alternative

If sig-release still wants a beta marker for the newest release branch, the other fix is to add --extra-version-markers=k8s-beta to ci-kubernetes-build-1-37 instead of deleting. That is a release-engineering call, which is why this is an issue rather than a PR.

Related

kubernetes/test-infra#37645 removes the now-dead k8s-master -> k8s-beta fork rule from ci-kubernetes-build. That rule stopped matching when kubernetes/test-infra@b7f6021f2a (2026-04-12) dropped --extra-version-markers from the master build job, which is why ci/k8s-master.txt no longer exists and why ci-kubernetes-build-1-37 forked without a marker at all.

/sig release
/area release-eng

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