[Discuss] Remove CI build jobs for older releases

[nickpeihl]

With Elastic Stack 8.0 coming out soon, I'd like to consider cleaning up some of the older CI build jobs for EMS Landing Page. I think we could remove all jobs prior to 7.15 since there are no further matching stack releases.

Under this proposal older branches and webpages (such as https://maps.elastic.co/v7.10) of ems-landing-page would be essentially frozen with no further updates. This is consistent with other products in the stack.

The jobs I'm proposing to remove are

• elastic+ems-landing-page+v2+stage.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v6.6+stage.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v6.7+stage.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.0+stage.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.2+stage.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.4+stage.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.6.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.7.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.8.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.9.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.10.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.11.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.12.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.13.yml
• elastic+ems-landing-page+v7.14.yml

There was a related effort to reduce builds in #229 with client-side routing, but that is proving too difficult.

Thoughts @jsanz @nyurik @thomasneirynck?

[nyurik]

sounds good to me. I think having this many jobs is a bit of an unneeded overcomplication, but one thing that concerns me -- if at some point there will be a sudden border change, e.g. due to some country "acquiring" a territory, we would be expected to show update geometries for all kibana versions, or risk political/legal issues, esp in that country.

[nyurik]

Going forward, i would love to do the same thing here as we did for newsfeed -- one script from the main branch generates different data for all needed versions.

[nickpeihl]

sounds good to me. I think having this many jobs is a bit of an unneeded overcomplication, but one thing that concerns me -- if at some point there will be a sudden border change, e.g. due to some country "acquiring" a territory, we would be expected to show update geometries for all kibana versions, or risk political/legal issues, esp in that country.

Since EMS landing page always pulls from the Elastic Maps Service APIs, geometry and attribute changes can be updated with no changes to this repository.

Going forward, i would love to do the same thing here as we did for newsfeed -- one script from the main branch generates different data for all needed versions.

Yup, that's pretty much what we do in ems-file-service to publish and update all necessary versions.

[jsanz]

@nyurik @nickpeihl can we move forward and remove those CI jobs and related backport configuration?

Is there anything else to do apart from creating a PR removing the Jenkins configuration files from the infra side or Jenkins will pick up the absent files and remove the entries in the UI?