Developer and Technology Previews: How they compare
Overview
Red Hat will, at times, make available preview release of software, features, and components to enable customers to evaluate functionality and provide feedback. This article compares the types of previews that are typically provided.
Developer Preview and Technology Preview both apply to versions of software provided by Red Hat intended to collect feedback from customers prior to possible supported versions.
Developer and Technology Preview Similarities
Both terms apply to functionality or installations that are “opt-in”, fully configurable, and default to being disabled. Customers must explicitly enable any preview functionality.
Both are NOT intended to be used for production environments or to address production use cases. Customers are strongly cautioned against running production or business-critical workloads on or in conjunction with Development or Technology Preview features or releases.
Both are intended to provide early exposure to new functionality and to collect feedback from customers and integrators.
Developer and Technology Preview Differences
The following table provides information about how these two types of release or feature types differ:
| Area | Developer Preview | Technology Preview |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Functionality is provided for early evaluation and feedback with no commitment by Red Hat to providing the functionality in a future release. | Functionality is, with rare exceptions, on Red Hat’s product roadmap for a future release. |
| Build & Distribution | Developer Preview releases may be built using systems that have not been verified as secured and with tools that are not part of Red Hat's standard tool chain. | Technology Preview releases are built and distributed via build pipelines and tooling that have been verified secure by Red Hat's Product Security and Information Security teams. |
| Testing | Functionality may not be fully/completely tested by Red Hat and therefore may not work or work well on all platforms or platform versions. | Functionality has undergone more complete Red Hat testing for the configurations supported by the underlying product. |
| Support | Functionality is not supported by Red Hat’s product support and customers will not be able to submit support cases, bugs or feature enhancements for functionality related to Developer Preview. | Functionality is provided with LIMITED support by Red Hat. Customers can open support cases, file bugs, and request feature enhancements. However, support is provided with NO commercial SLA and no commitment to implement any changes. |
| Feedback | Feedback is collected but no response to the feedback can be expected. | Feedback is routed through Red Hat’s support case system, which connects the feedback to product teams as bugs and feature enhancements. Acknowledgement and possible follow-ups can be expected. |
| Documentation | Functionality is provided with very limited, if any, documentation. Documentation is not included as part of the product’s documentation set. | Functionality is documented as part of the products documentation set (on the Red Hat Customer Portal) and/or via the release notes. |
Learn more about Developer Preview
Learn more about Technology Preview
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