Cloudera is focused on helping our customers by swiftly innovating on the product and technology side. We accomplish this by bringing powerful new capabilities to our platform that enable customers to drive even greater business value. Cloudera has been providing regular upgrades for customers from our legacy releases on HDP/CDH, and we now designate certain releases as Long-Term Support (LTS) releases to help customers feel confident in upgrading large, complex clusters that require significant planning to upgrade. This is helpful for those who typically do not perform frequent major upgrades and thus depend on the long-term support these releases provide with critical bug fixes, security fixes and a stable platform.
Since the launch of CDP Private Cloud Base, we’ve provided 6 new releases of the platform, each introducing innovative new features, platform enhancements, robust upgrade paths for legacy platforms, broader integrations, and of course, bug and security fixes. With the release of Service Pack 1 on top of CDP Private Cloud Base 7.1.7 we are providing customers with a stable platform that fixes security vulnerabilities and critical bugs. 7.1.7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) provides critical fixes to Log4J 2.x vulnerabilities, Log4J1.x CVE mitigation and several other Security and CVE fixes. As such, we have designated CDP Private Cloud Base 7.1.7 as our first LTS release (see release announcement). This LTS release model gives customers an easy path to a stable, performant, reliable, and secure platform without having to redesign or make changes to their applications or application life cycle.
What is an LTS release?
An LTS release is a version of the platform that Cloudera commits to supporting for four years, without any updates that introduce platform changes or new features. We will of course provide critical bug and security fixes on a periodic basis (see below). This is ideal for customers with large, complex clusters who need significant time and effort to perform an upgrade, giving them confidence of version stability without the disruption of frequent updates.
Let’s quickly define some relevant terms to frame the LTS release:
- A Hotfix is created to address a specific customer reported issue, problem, or customer scenario. A Hotfix can address either a single issue or a multiple set of issues.
- A Cumulative Hotfix (CHF) is an update that contains all previous hotfixes to date. This provides stability between service packs, providing fixes to issues you may not even have encountered and no longer need to worry about.
- A Service Pack is a tested set of all CHF, Hotfixes, security and CVE updates, critical bug fixes, minor platform certifications and updates. Performance fixes, regression bug fixes and non-customer visible fixes will be included in a service pack.
Long Term Support releases (including CHF and Service Packs) are designed to reduce the effort required to deploy an update. Upgrade CM and then follow these three key steps - download the new parcel, distribute the files to your cluster(s), and activate the new parcel. We provide the details of this process in a Knowledge Base article.
Frequent adoption of CHF and SP releases solves problems before you encounter them in production.
Who is an LTS release suitable for?
Customers with large, complex environments or who have workloads supporting critical business operations may prefer to upgrade on a less frequent basis, and LTS is a great upgrade option for such customers. We appreciate that our customers have wide and varied upgrade planning cycles and the LTS release is designed to allow ample time to plan for your next upgrade.
Here are some benefits of choosing the LTS release cadence for you to consider:
Reduced Risk - Remove the need and associated expense/disruption of taking feature releases just to get access to bug fixes. This will improve your overall platform reliability.
Enterprise Grade - Realize maximum value from continuous product improvement by receiving bug fixes and security updates on a planned regular cadence, without introducing any functional platform changes that need extensive testing.
Service Packs - A release model for customer reported bugs to be addressed through regular maintenance Service Packs and cumulative hotfixes.
Stable Product Release - Stable product release with full backward compatibility to previous releases.
To quote a customer of ours, “One of the biggest challenges with our data platform today is that our Infosec team only allows us to use the latest supported release. By moving to a release that’s supported for four years, we give our business and Infosec teams the confidence that we are building on a secure, stable platform and they can focus on their business value.”
What is a Feature Release?
Cloudera will continue to provide fast-paced feature innovations on CDP Private Cloud Base with the regular release versions (“Feature Releases”). These regular versions of the platform will be supported for 18 months and are designed for customers who adopt new features at a fast pace. The next LTS release will include features from the regular release versions plus additional innovations.
To help clarify the difference between an LTS and Feature release, here’s a breakdown of what the policies look like for each.
Policy | Long Term Support releases | Feature releases |
Technical Support Cloudera Support End of Life Policy | 48 months | 18 months |
Service Packs | Twice a Year. | - |
Security Vulnerabilities | Cumulative HotFixes and Service Packs | Cumulative HotFixes |
Cloudera’s Long Term Support Release will contain only the following
- Critical security bug fixes
- Critical bug fixes
- All other bug fixes, whenever possible
This allows customers to realize maximum value from our continuous product development without strictly keeping up with the regular release cadence.
Next Steps
To further explore the benefits of an LTS release for your deployment, here are some additional resources for you to peruse:
Reach out to your Cloudera account team to discuss the impact and benefits the LTS release has for your organization and what options are available for you to upgrade to the latest LTS release of CDP Private Cloud Base.
