Red Hat Application Services Product Update and Support Policy

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Overview

Red Hat provides support and maintenance over stated time periods for the major versions of Red Hat Application Services products (i.e., EAP versions 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x). The published life cycle calendars for Red Hat Application Services products allow customers and partners to effectively plan, deploy, and support Red Hat Application Services products.

The life cycle associated with a Red Hat Application Services 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 Application Services product life cycles are generally three, five, or seven years in length, depending on the product. For certain Red Hat Application Services 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 Application Services 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., EAP version 7.3). Patches will 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 7.x patches, EAP 7.x CPs, and EAP 7.x minor releases are in the same EAP 7 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., EAP 7.0). Where incompatibilities arise, they will be documented in the release notes or may be reported as bugs.

NOTE: Defect and security fixes are only provided for the latest Minor, Micro or CP release, therefore upgrading to the latest release is required in order to receive the current updates. Additionally, upgrades and patches are expected to be applied to a supported configuration as published.

Red Hat Application Services 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.

Each major version of a Red Hat Application Services product has its own life cycle that will include one or more minor releases and related patch updates. 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 7.1 will maintain API-level compatibility with EAP 7.0, the parent release of the EAP 7 family). Possible exceptions to this rule could include fixes introduced to address Critical impact security issues. Furthermore, major versions of Red Hat Application Services products endeavor to maintain significant backward-compatibility with previous versions (e.g., EAP 7.0 endeavors to maintain significant backward compatibility with EAP 6.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 Application Services products is divided into three primary phases: the Full Support Phase, the Maintenance Phase, and the Extended Life Phase.

More information is contained in the Red Hat Application Services Product Update and Support Policy FAQ.

Phase 1: Full Support

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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

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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

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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. Extended Life Support subscriptions of Red Hat Application Services products provide decreasing support and maintenance over time as described below.

Troubleshooting for Application Services product releases in the ELS Life Cycle Phase is limited to the latest minor release.

Container distributions of Application Services products in the ELS Life Cycle Phase will be marked "Deprecated" in the Red Hat Container Catalog. See the article Deprecation of Red Hat Runtimes product container images in the Red Hat Container Catalog for more detail.

ELS-1:

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ELS-1 delivers Critical impact security fixes and selected urgent-priority bug fixes, if and when available. Customers may request specific security or bug fixes and are encouraged to continue applying patch releases. ELS-1 is generally available for 3 years following the end of Maintenance Support.

ELS-2:

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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. Existing installations are product installations that were completed before the support phase (ELS-2) started. Red Hat discourages deploying new installations after the Maintenance phase of support ends. While the existing product installations can and should be maintained, new deployments should be made using fully supported versions.

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.

Life Cycle Phase Comparison Table

The following table details each type of software maintenance performed during a typical life cycle:

Life Cycle Duration

Red Hat Application Services product life cycles are generally three, five, or seven years in length as described below.

Long-life Product Life Cycle

A Long-life Product Life Cycle of seven years is generally applied to foundation products, such at Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. As depicted below, the seven-year cycle includes four years of Full Support and three years of Maintenance Support. Extensions beyond the seventh year (“Extended Life Support”) are available under a separate subscription, scope of coverage, and SLA.

Long-life Product Life Cycle

Phase 1 Full Support (4 years)				Phase 2 Maintenance Support (3 years)			Phase 3 Extended Life Support (3-6 years)
Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6	Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10	Year 11	Year 12	Year 13

Standard Product Life Cycle

A Standard Product Life Cycle of five years applies to most Red Hat Application Services products. The Standard Product Life Cycle is also composed of two phases, Full Support and Maintenance Support. Extensions beyond the fifth year (“Extended Life Support”) are available under a separate subscription, scope of coverage, and SLA.

Standard Product Life Cycle

Phase 1 Full Support (3 years)			Phase 2 Maintenance Support (2 years)		Phase 3 Extended Life Support (3-6 years)
Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6	Year 7	Year 8	Year 9	Year 10	Year 11

Limited Product Life Cycle

The Limited Product Life Cycle of three years is generally applied to newer product areas and rapidly changing technologies such as development frameworks. The Limited Product Life Cycle is only composed of one phase, the Full Support Phase, however, variations may include a Maintenance Phase for some product releases. Extensions beyond the third year (“Extended Life Support”) are available under a separate subscription, scope of coverage, and SLA.

Limited Product Life Cycle

Phase 1 Full Support (3 years)			Phase 3 Extended Life Support (3-6 years)
Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5	Year 6	Year 7	Year 8	Year 9

Product Life Cycle Dates

Listed below are the life cycle dates for all currently supported Red Hat Application Services products. Life cycle dates for product releases that have reached their end of support life can be found on the Archived JBoss Product Life Cycle Information page.

Red Hat Integration and Application Foundations Products

Listed below are the life cycle dates for the supported components included with the Red Hat Integration and Application Foundation offerings.

Red Hat build of Apache Camel

The Red Hat build of Apache Camel 4 now integrates previously separate components of Camel extensions for Quarkus and Camel for Spring Boot. As a result, it offers a unified lifecycle moving forward.

Listed below are the life cycle dates for the previous releases of Red Hat build of Apache Camel 3.

Red Hat JBoss Core Services Collection Lifecycle Dates

Listed below are the life cycle dates for all currently supported Red Hat JBoss Core Services Collection services. Life cycle dates for Core Service releases that have reached their end of support life can be found on the Archived JBoss Product Life Cycle Information page.

Products that are not listed above are either no longer actively sold or have reached the end of their supported Life Cycle. For more information check the Archived JBoss Product Life Cycle Information page.

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