Release Checklist v21.08

[Salonijain27]

Release Checklist for v21.10:

Status	Task	Start	End	Owner
Pre-release
	Notification to team of last feature sprint in milestone 2021-07-05 - 2021-07-16	2021-07-05	2021-07-05	@sameerz
	Burndown (no new features for current release)	2021-07-19	2021-07-30	Team
	Update docs for current release in spark-rapids	2021-07-26	2021-07-30	Team
	Get RAPIDS 21.10 cudf java build working.	2021-07-19	2021-07-23	@pxLi
	Create 21.10 branch	2021-07-26	2021-07-26	@pxLi
	Automerge from 21.08 to 21.10	2021-07-26	2021-07-30	@pxLi
	Enable Jenkins builds (premerge, nightly, integration, performance) for 21.10	2021-07-26	2021-07-26	@pxLi
	Virtual review	2021-08-02	2021-08-13	@krajendrannv
	[cudf 21.08] Java release to sonatype	2021-08-05	2021-08-05	@NvTimLiu
	Notify RAPIDS team of javadocs for 21.08	2021-08-06	2021-08-06	@GaryShen2008
Staging release
	Make 21.10 the default branch	2021-08-02	2021-08-02	@jlowe
	Merge all remaining branch-21.08 PRs	2021-07-30	2021-07-30	Team
	Create CHANGELOG.md	2021-07-30	2021-07-30	@pxLi
	Create a PR (not squashed) to merge from branch-21.08 to main. Needs review from repository owner	2021-08-05	2021-08-05	@NvTimLiu
	Trigger the release Jenkins job on the main branch and deploy the jar to sonatype staging	2021-08-09	2021-08-09	@NvTimLiu
	Deliver Snapshot packages to QA	2021-08-02	2021-08-02	@NvTimLiu
	Deliver final packages to QA	2021-08-09	2021-08-09	@NvTimLiu
	Run integration tests on staging jars with AQE on, UCX on, Databricks Azure, Databricks AWS, Dataproc	2021-08-09	2021-08-13	@NvTimLiu
	Run integration tests on staging jars with AQE on, A10/A30 manually	2021-08-09	2021-08-13	@GaryShen2008
	Run LHA tests on staging jars	2021-08-09	2021-08-13	@NvTimLiu
	Run pre-processing workflow for DLRM sample use case	2021-08-09	2021-08-13	@johnzhong
	QA testing with Snapshot on YARN, NGC with Volta and Ampere	2021-08-02	2021-08-06	@yuange98
	QA testing with final packages on YARN, NGC with Volta and Ampere	2021-08-09	2021-08-13	@yuange98
Release
	Tag the release and deploy the staging artifacts to maven central repository	2021-08-18	2021-08-18	@NvTimLiu
	Update gh-pages	2021-08-16	2021-08-18	@viadea
	Update docs for current release in spark-rapids-examples	2021-08-16	2021-08-18	@GaryShen2008
	Update rapids.sh in https://github.com/GoogleCloudDataproc/initialization-actions/tree/master/rapids GoogleCloudDataproc/initialization-actions#921 for the plugin, pending update for xgboost	2021-08-16	2021-08-18	@viadea

[GaryShen2008]

Enable Jenkins builds (premerge, nightly, integration, performance) for 21.10 | 2021-07-20 | 2021-07-20

It should be the same day when we open the new branch 21.10, I think.

Trigger the release Jenkins job on the main branch and deploy the jar to sonatype staging | 2021-08-02 | 2021-08-02

The building should be after cudf release [cudf 21.08] Java release to sonatype, 2021-08-06.

[pxLi]

cudf 21.10 PR can not be merged which has been reported internally. I am still waiting for that to get ready before merge my version update rapidsai/cudf#8765, this may delay setup 21.10.0 cudfJNI build until next week.

pre-merge of spark-rapids branch-21.10 is ready, so this will not affect development of plugin-only change against 21.10, but it will affect change that relies on cudf 21.10

[pxLi]

21.08.0 changelog has been init in #3083, we will do a final update before the real package build

[NvTimLiu]

As cudf has not be released yet, cudfjni 21.08.0 plans to release on Aug 5, we will update POM dependency after cudfjni 21.08.0 release.
So I suppose we postpone the checklist item after cudfjni 21.08.0 release, after we get all our docs and POMs updated.

Create a PR (not squashed) to merge from branch-21.08 to main.

[NvTimLiu]

Removed tests on AWS EMR, as our spark-rapids do not support EMR spark runtime currently.