Hello here, *TL;DR; Pushing release images to DockerHub is going to be more than 5x faster (<15 minutes rather than way above 1hr).*
I am not sure if you are aware but for the 3.0.0 release, together with Kaxil, we had to bend ourselves backwards a bit and do a few last minute, high-stress bug-fixes to be able to release airflow images for testing - bit RC and final images. Also hopefully next releases will be way smoother than the first 3.0.0 releases - because with https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/50176 we could use recent `ubuntu-22.04-arm` runners that GitHub made available. I had to add capability of building the images separately and merging them to make it work - but it turned out to be relatively easy - just incremental addition to the existing breeze tooling. With a few earlier PRs where I added a number of robustness and tests and tested the scenarios where we had Alpha/Beta/RC packages and dependent airflow Alpha/Beta/RC in various combinations and inter-dependencies of those, and allowing various stages of pre-release for them and I think finally we should have pretty robust way of being able to release Airflow RC candidates depending on any release candidate of providers in pretty much all reasonable combinations. There are some very early checks and validations that should warn the Release Manager very early in case there are any problems with the RC candidate. I also tested the workflow when - if we find any fixable "dockerfile" or "script" issue during the release we should be able to release images using a completely separate branch with fixes. This should speed up release image preparation to < 15 mins from more than an hour and that also means that when the release manager announces Airflow, images should be long ready then. I hope that will make our future release process and testing way smoother. J.
