We’ve given Enterprise releases a new name: Introducing Long Term Support releases

[#1]

History of Enterprise releases

Back in 2018, we first announced Enterprise releases for Jira Software and Confluence Server and Data Center. These releases were designed to help customers feel confident upgrading large, complex instances – ones that require significant planning to upgrade. Fast forward to today and we now offer these releases for Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and, as of December, Bitbucket.

Long Term Support releases are the new Enterprise releases

We constantly hear from admins that the biggest benefit of these releases is longer access to critical bug fixes. Especially for those with especially complex instances who can’t perform a major upgrade more than once a year and thus depend on the long-term support these releases provide. That’s why we’re updating the name to Long Term Support releases.

We’ll continue to ship Feature releases for our core Server and Data Center products every 5-7 weeks. These releases will also maintain consistently high levels of quality and stability - every release should meet the stability expectations you have.

Extending Security Bug Support

To live up to its new name, we’re also updating our security bug fix policy. We will continue to backport critical security bug fixes and now when architecturally possible we will also backport all other security bug fixes to Long Term Support releases. We want to make sure that if you get on a Long Term Support release, that you are able to stay on that release for a year or more. Backporting most security bug fixes allows you to do exactly that.

We aim to backport as many security bug fixes to an LTS release as possible, however, there may be some fixes that we choose not to backport due to risk, complexity or because the fix requires changes to an API, code used by third-party apps (also known as add-ons), or infrastructure that we would usually reserve for a platform release.

To help clarify the difference between an LTS and Feature release, here’s a breakdown of what the policies look like for each (more background on release types here).

Policy	Long Term Support releases	Feature releases
Technical Support Atlassian Support End of Life Policy	24 months	24 months
Product Bugs Atlassian Server Bug Fix Policy	6 weeks for all bug fixes + 24 months for critical bug fixes	6 weeks for all bug fixes
Security Bugs Security Bug Fix Policy	New 24 months for critical security bug fixes and when possible we will backport all other security bug fixes.	6 months for critical bug fixes

Which Release is Right for You?

Deciding if a Feature or Long Term Support release is right for you depends on the needs of your business. There is no one size fits all approach, but here are some questions to consider before adopting a release:

• What is your upgrade cadence? If you upgrade frequently, more than once a year, we recommend sticking to Feature releases. If you plan to upgrade annually or more, then Long Term Support releases may be a better choice.

• How complex is your instance? If upgrading your instance is fairly straight-forward and doesn’t require much planning then Feature releases may be right for you. If upgrading takes more planning - maybe you have many customizations, apps, and other requirements which mean more testing and coordination before an upgrade, then Long Term Support releases may be a better choice.

• How much do you value new features? If you want the latest features that are being shipped, then Feature releases are right for you. If you want the newest features from a platform release, but don’t need to quickly adopt the newest feature in a version, then Long Term Support releases may be a better fit.

To find out which Long Term Support releases are available right now, please see here.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Hi! 

Thank you for that :) 

Just curious, any plans to make independent component upgrade like apps? 

[Matthias Damsch]

Hi, we explicitly welcome this step, but from our point of view there are more points we would like to see in the long term support releases.

1. Large organizations with complex instances require a certain amount of advance planning for upgrades, so it would be desirable to have the LTS releases published annually at fixed times.
2. In addition to the security-related bug fixes, we would like to see fixes for important bugs in the LTS releases (for the entire periode of 24-month). Especially bugs that endanger the stability of very large and complex instances should be fixed for these releases as well.

[Lisa Kaufman]

Hi @Matthias Damsch, thank you for your feedback. To clarify:

1. We understand the need for advance planning and that’s why we’re continuing to target the same ~12 month release cadence between LTS releases. So you can expect an LTS release to be published roughly around the same time the following year. We want to make sure that our releases always meet your expectations and so it is difficult to make promises for fixed times beyond that as it may compromise the quality of the release. 

2. With LTS releases, you’ll receive 24 months of support for ALL critical bugs (not just security-related). See this page for more info on our bug fix policy.

Hope this helps!

[Lisa Kaufman]

@Gonchik Tsymzhi4 Thank you for the feedback- we've shared it back to the Product team. We're always looking for new ways to make the upgrade process easier for you and will consider that for the future!

[P_D_ Foerster]

Thanks for the name updates. It's called LTS for a lot of products / services so it only makes sense.

I'm glad to see that you are now considering security fixes in general! :)