Kong Operator version support policy

Kong primarily follows semantic versioning (SemVer) for its products.

At Kong’s discretion a specific minor version can be marked as a LTS version. The LTS version is supported on a given distribution for the duration of the distribution’s lifecycle, or for 3 years from LTS release whichever comes sooner. LTS only receives security fixes or certain critical patches at the discretion of Kong. Kong guarantees that at any given time, there will be at least 1 active LTS Kong version.

LTS versions of Kong Operator are supported for 3 years after release. Standard versions are supported for 1 year after release.

Kong Operator is a recently released product and does not currently provide an LTS version.

Table 1: Version Support for Kong Operator

Unfortunately, all software is susceptible to bugs. Kong seeks to remedy bugs through a structured protocol as follows:

• Serious security vulnerabilities are treated with the utmost priority. See our security vulnerability reporting and remedy policy, including how to report a vulnerability.

• Bugs which result in production outages or effective non-operation (such as catastrophic performance degradation) will be remedied through high priority bug fixes and provided in patch releases to the Latest Major/Minor Version Release of all currently supported Major Versions of the software and optionally ported to other versions at Kong’s discretion based on the severity and impact of the bug.

• Bugs which prevent the upgrade of a supported version to a more recent supported version will be remedied through high priority bug fixes and provided in the Latest Major/Minor Version Release of all currently supported Major Versions of the software and optionally ported to other versions at Kong’s discretion based on the severity and impact of the bug.

• Other bugs as well as feature requests will be assessed for severity and fixes or enhancements applied to versions at Kong’s discretion depending on the impact of the bug. Typically, these types of fixes and enhancements will only be applied to the most recent Minor Version in the most recent Major Version.

Customers with platinum or higher subscriptions may request fixes outside of the above and Kong will assess them at its sole discretion.

From time to time as part of the evolution of our products, we deprecate (in other words, remove or discontinue) product features or functionality.

We aim to provide customers with at least 6 months’ notice of the removal or phasing out of a significant feature or functionality. We may provide less or no notice if the change is necessary for security or legal reasons, though such situations should be rare. We may provide notice in our documentation, product update emails, or in-product notifications if applicable.

Once we’ve announced we will deprecate a significant feature or functionality, in general, we won’t extend or enhance the feature or functionality.

• The above is a summary only and is qualified by Kong’s Support and Maintenance Policy.
• The above applies to Kong standard software builds only.

Kong Operator uses a rapid release channel. Some functionality, particularly Kong AI Gateway, evolves faster than the quarterly minor release cadence that Kong Gateway functionality follows. Rapid releases let Kong ship that functionality when it’s ready.

Rapid releases are fully supported, production grade releases. They aren’t previews, betas, or experimental builds.

The two channels are cumulative, not alternatives. Every change in a rapid release is included in the next standard quarterly minor version, so you can choose the channel that suits your use case:

See the Kong AI Gateway version support policy for the support policy covering AI Gateway functionality.

Versioning and installation

A rapid release is versioned as a pre-release of the standard minor version it leads into, for example Kong Operator 2.4.0-rapid.2.0 on chart version 1.5.0-rapid.2.0.

Helm therefore treats rapid releases as pre-releases and skips them unless you ask for one explicitly. Without --version, helm install gives you the latest stable chart, which doesn’t include the functionality that has only shipped in a rapid release.

To list the rapid releases available in the chart repository:

helm search repo kong/kong-operator --devel --versions

To install a rapid release, or to move an existing installation onto a newer one, set the chart version explicitly. --reuse-values keeps the values you installed with:

helm upgrade kong-operator kong/kong-operator -n kong-system --version 1.5.0-rapid.2.0 --reuse-values

For a full install walkthrough, see Install Kong Operator.

You can see the version compatibility matrix with Kubernetes versions in the compatibility reference.