Red Hat Middleware Product Update and Support Policy (Life Cycle)

Overview

All Red Hat Middleware products follow a similar support and maintenance life cycle with the exception of Open Liberty which is included in the Red Hat Runtimes entitlement. Open Liberty provides a Continuous Delivery life cycle that’s documented on the Open Liberty Support Life Cycle page, and the contents of this current page does not apply to Open Liberty.

Red Hat provides support and maintenance over stated time periods for the major versions of Red Hat Middleware products (i.e., versions 4.x, 5.x, or 6.x). The published life cycle calendars for Red Hat Middleware products allow customers and partners to effectively plan, deploy, and support Red Hat Middleware products.

The life cycle associated with a Red Hat Middleware product identifies the various levels of maintenance for each release of that product over a period of time from the initial release—or general availability (GA)—to the end of the maintenance phase. Red Hat Middleware product life cycles are generally three, five, or seven years in length, depending on the product. For certain Red Hat Middleware products (as described below), an optional add-on Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) subscription may be purchased to extend the life cycle by three (3) additional years.

Software updates to Red Hat Middleware products, if and when available, are delivered via software patches. Patches can be released individually on an as-needed basis, aggregated as part of a Cumulative Patch (CP), or included in a minor release (e.g., version 5.1). Patches may contain security and/or bug fixes. Feature enhancements are generally introduced in minor and major releases—not as patches or in CPs. Red Hat's goal is to maintain compatibility across the full life cycle of a product family (e.g., EAP 5.x patches, EAP 5.x CPs, and EAP 5.x releases are in the same EAP 5 product family). Patches, CPs, and minor releases are tested and qualified against prior releases for a given product family. Red Hat will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide compatibility with the initial major release (e.g., 5.0). Where incompatibilities arise, they will be documented in the release notes or may be reported as bugs.

Red Hat JBoss Middleware life cycles are designed to reduce the level of change within each major release over time, increasing predictability and decreasing maintenance costs. Released patches, CPs, and minor releases will remain accessible to active subscribers for the entire life cycle of a product family. Red Hat publishes product life cycle calendars in an effort to provide as much transparency as possibly but may make exceptions from these policies if unforeseeable conflicts arise (such as the end-of-life (EOL) of a dependent component or platform) that are outside of Red Hat’s control.

Every major version of a Red Hat Middleware product is maintained and supported independently during its life cycle. For each major version of a product, patch updates, if and when available, will be issued serially and will be applicable incrementally to previously released patches and CPs. Minor releases will aggregate the contents of prior patches and CPs, and they may add additional new functionality. Subsequent patches and CPs will be based on and require the installation of minor updates that precede them. During the entire life cycle, Red Hat makes commercially reasonable efforts to maintain API-level compatibility across all minor releases and asynchronous patches (e.g., EAP 5.1 will maintain API-level compatibility with EAP 5.0, the parent of the EAP 5 family). Possible exceptions to this rule could include fixes introduced to address Critical impact security issues. Furthermore, major versions of Red Hat JBoss Middleware products endeavor to maintain significant backward-compatibility with previous versions (e.g., EAP 5.0 endeavors to maintain significant backward compatibility with EAP 4.x) to aid with the migration of applications from one major release to another.

Life Cycle Phases

The life cycle for a major release of Red Hat Middleware products is divided into three primary phases: the Full Support Phase, the Maintenance Phase, and the Extended Life Phase.

Phase 1: Full Support

Start Date: General Availability

Full support is provided according to the published Scope of Coverage and Service Level Agreement. Likewise, Development Support is provided according to the published Scope of Coverage and Service Level Agreement. All available and qualified patches will be applied via periodic product updates and CPs, or as required for qualified security patches.

Phase 2: Maintenance Support

Start Date: no less than one (1) year after General Availability.

Production support is provided according to the published Scope of Coverage and Service Level Agreement. Likewise, Development Support is provided according to the published Scope of Coverage and Service Level Agreement. During the maintenance phase, qualified security patches of Critical or Important impact, as well as select mission-critical bug-fix patches, will be released.

Phase 3: Extended Life Support

Extended Life support is provided according to the published Scope of Coverage and Service Level Agreement. Unlike our Full Support and Maintenance Support phases, this support phase requires an ELS subscription in addition to a supported product’s base subscription. The Middleware ELS subscriptions provide decreasing support and maintenance over time as described below.

ELS-1:

ELS-1 delivers Critical impact security fixes and selected urgent-priority bug fixes, if and when available. For ELS-1 subscribers, Red Hat will generally continue to proactively provide the Critical impact security fixes if and when available independent of customer requests. ELS-1 is generally available for 3 years following the end of Maintenance Support.

ELS-2:

ELS-2 support is offered after the end of the ELS-1. ELS-2 provides limited ongoing technical support to include: Advice and guidance for migrating to current product releases, problem evaluation and workarounds. Bug fixes, security fixes, hardware enablement or root-cause analysis (other than to determine possible workarounds) are not available during this phase, and support is limited to existing installations only.

The duration of ELS-2 support is scheduled for 3 years and may be extended on a product-by-product basis. Red Hat reserves the right to terminate the ongoing support in the ELS-2 for a particular product at any time beyond the initial 3 year period.

Learn more: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/jboss_notes