Versions, Platforms, and Deprecation

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

Stable releases

All BEL releases are stable releases. Stable releases follow strict “semantic versioning” guarantees that provide explicit control over the level of risk introduced by upgrades.

Semantic versioning

BEL version number 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-2.17.1 denotes major version 17, minor version 1.

Changes in version number have the following implications:

• 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.
• Major version changes will typically introduce large new features, and may introduce breaking changes if necessary.

For example:

• Moving from enterprise-2.17.0 to enterprise-2.17.1: minor version upgrade. Should not introduce breaking changes.
• Moving from enterprise-2.16.10 to enterprise-2.17.0: major version upgrade. May introduce breaking changes that require action on your part; see release notes for details.

Hotpatch releases

We also publish hotpatch releases designed to ease compliance with automated security scanners. These releases are marked with an additional patch level suffix. For example:

• enterprise-2.17.0-0: major version 17, minor version 0, no hotpatch
• enterprise-2.17.0-1: major version 17, minor version 0, hotpatch 1

Hotpatch releases are only available on some plans. See Plans and Pricing for details.

Support and deprecation

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

Support levels

On-call support and hotpatches are only available on some plans. See Plans and Pricing for details.

Support Lifetimes

A note on point releases

Point releases, aka minor version releases, consist primarily of bugfixes. To meet semantic versioning guarantees,these bugfixes are applied to earlier codebases in a process called “backporting”. While we make every effort to backport bugfixes to all active versions, sometimes the cost this is prohibitive. Thus, our backport policy for Active support is two-pronged:

• For the most recent major version, we will backport all bugfixes.
• For versions under active support that are not the most recent major version, we will provide “best effort” backports, but may exclude certain changes if the cost is prohibitive.

Supported Kubernetes versions

The officially supported Kubernetes versions for BEL releases 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-2.17.1 include: