Versions, Platforms, and Deprecation

Buoyant provides formal support commitments for BEL releases to our customers. This page describes types and scope of those commitments.

Release channels

Buoyant provides two release channels for BEL releases: stable and preview.

Stable releases (e.g. enterprise-2.19.6) are intended for production use. Stable releases strict “semantic versioning” guarantees that provide explicit control over the level of risk introduced by upgrades. (See below.)

Preview releases (e.g. preview-25.10.7) are not intended for production use and may not provide the same set of functionality or guarantees as enterprise releases. Preview releases are not stable releases and do not follow semantic versioning. You generally should not use preview releases unless explicitly instructed by Buoyant support personnel.

Stable release versions

Semantic versioning

BEL stable release version numbers follow the form enterprise-2.<major>.<minor>. In other words, 2 is a static prefix, followed by the major version, then the minor. For example, enterprise-2.19.0 denotes a stable release with major version 19, minor version 0.

Changes in version number have the following implications:

• Major version changes will typically introduce large new features, and may introduce breaking changes if necessary.
• Minor version changes are intended to be backwards compatible with the previous minor version and will not introduce breaking changes. These releases will primary provide bugfixes, and will rarely introduce new features unless they are exceedingly low risk.

For example:

• enterprise-2.18.0 to enterprise-2.18.1: minor version upgrade. Should not introduce breaking changes.
• enterprise-2.18.1 to enterprise-2.19.0: major version upgrade. May introduce breaking changes that require action on your part; see release notes for details.

Hotpatch versions

For versions of BEL prior to 2.19, we occasionally published hotpatch releases. These releases were marked with an additional patch level suffix. For example:

• enterprise-2.18.0-0: major version 18, minor version 0, no hotpatch
• enterprise-2.18.0-1: major version 18, minor version 0, hotpatch 1

In BEL 2.19 and beyond, we have consolidated hotpatch releases into minor releases.

Support and deprecation

Buoyant provides four levels of support for BEL releases: Active, Maintenance, EOL, and Archived. Each level provides different guarantees.

Support levels

Bugfix releases: These are non-breaking, minor version releases that provide bugfixes, security fixes, or introduce new minor features.

CVE releases: These are hygienic releases that address CVEs found in dependencies. These do not represent known security vulnerabilities in Linkerd, but are designed to ease compliance with automated security scanners. These may take the form of minor version releases or (for versions of BEL prior to 2.19) hotpatch releases.

On-call support: This is support with response time SLAs. Note that this is only available on some plans; see Plans and Pricing for details.

Bugfix policy

Buoyant typically maintains multiple simultaneous active releases. While we make every effort to backport bugfixes to all active versions, sometimes the cost this is prohibitive. Thus, our bugfix policy for Active support versions is two-pronged:

• For the most recent major version, we will provide bugfixes in the form of minor version releases.
• For versions under active support that are not the most recent major version, we will provide backports if at all possible, but may exclude certain bugfixes if the cost is prohibitive.

Support lifetimes

Supported Kubernetes versions

The officially supported Kubernetes versions for BEL releases are as follows:

Gateway API compatibility

The compatible Gateway API for Linkerd versions are as follows:

Tested Kubernetes platforms

BEL should work on any relatively modern Kubernetes distribution. We actively test the latest release of BEL against specific platforms and environments.

Tested platforms for BEL enterprise-2.19.6 include: