Versions and Platforms

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd is published as stable, versioned releases. The latest version is BEL enterprise-2.16.2. These releases are intended for production use.

Stable releases

All BEL releases are stable releases. These releases are designed to introduce minimal change to an existing system and come with documented stability guarantees. Stable releases provide “semantic versioning” guarantees, including that changes in minor versions are as minimal as possible and do not introduce breaking changes.

For stable releases, BEL follows a version numbering scheme of 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-2.14.10 denotes major version 14, minor version 10.

Changes in minor versions are intended to be backwards compatible with the previous version and will typically not introduce new features. Changes in major version will typically introduce major new features, which may introduce breaking changes, but only if necessary—and only if well-documented.

For example:

  • Moving from enterprise-2.15.1 to enterprise-2.15.2: minor version upgrade; no breaking changes.
  • Moving from enterprise-2.14.10 to enterprise-2.15.0: major version upgrade; possible breaking changes that require action on your part. See release notes for details.

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

  • enterprise-2.14.10-4: major version 14, minor version 10, hotpatch 4
  • enterprise-2.14.7-0: major version 14, minor version 7, no hotpatch

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

Supported Kubernetes versions

The officially supported Kubernetes versions are as follows:

Linkerd VersionMinimum Kubernetes VersionMax Kubernetes Version
enterprise-2.141.211.28
enterprise-2.151.221.31
enterprise-2.161.221.31

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. Known tested platforms for BEL enterprise-2.16.2 include:

Provider/DistributionPlatform DetailsTest status
Amazon EKS1.24 (m6i.large)
Amazon EKS1.29 (m6i.large)
Amazon EKS1.29 (m6i.large, cilium)
Amazon EKS1.29 (m7g.large, linux/arm64)
Amazon EKS1.30 (m6i.large)
Amazon EKS1.31 (m6i.large)
Google GKE1.29 (n2-standard-2)
Microsoft Azure AKS1.29 (Standard_B2ms)
Microsoft Azure AKS1.30.3 (Standard_DS4_v2)
Microsoft Azure AKS1.30.4 (Standard_DS3_v2)
Oracle OKE1.29.1 (VM.Standard2.4)
Rancher RKE21.29.7 (r1.large)
Red Hat OpenShift4.14.0-okd (r1.large)