In this blog article, I would like to inform you about important adjustments to the release and maintenance times for UCS patch level releases. First of all, I would like to give you a brief overview of how a maintenance cycle of UCS works and which components are part of it.
A versioning of UCS is structured as follows:
- Major Release (e.g. 5.0-3)
Usually, a major release involves fundamental and comprehensive functional enhancements and changes, during which, for example, interfaces in our software may also change completely. - Minor Release (e.g. 5.0-3)
Minor release versions focus on product enhancements and bug fixes. Interfaces are usually only extended compatibly or adjusted in case of problems. - Patchlevel Release (e.g. 5.0-3)
We continuously provide improvements and bug fixes for minor problems using errata updates and summarize them in patchlevel releases. So far, we have published patchlevel releases at irregular intervals.
With regard to patch level releases, however, UCS users lacked predictability and reliability in the operation of UCS. The maintenance period of a patch level release expired six weeks after the release of the next patch level release. Combined with the irregular release times, this made it difficult for UCS customers to schedule and perform updates.
To provide our customers with better planning and longer response times, we have decided to make two important adjustments to our releases. For one thing, we will now be releasing patch level releases at regular three-month intervals in the first half of the last month of each quarter – i.e. in the first halves of March, June, September and December. For another thing, we are extending the maintenance period for patch level releases for our enterprise customers: They will receive updates until twelve weeks after the release of the following patch level release. This extension allows our enterprise customers to schedule the update with less time pressure.
