Ceph Releases (general)

Starting with the Nautilus release (14.2.0), there is a new stable release cycle every year, targeting March 1st. Each stable release series will receive a name (e.g., ‘Mimic’) and a major release number (e.g., 13 for Mimic because ‘M’ is the 13th letter of the alphabet).

Releases are named after a species of cephalopod (usually the common name, since the latin names are harder to remember or pronounce).

Version numbers have three components, x.y.z. x identifies the release cycle (e.g., 13 for Mimic). y identifies the release type:

• x.0.z - development releases (for early testers and the brave at heart)

• x.1.z - release candidates (for test clusters, brave users)

This versioning convention started with the 9.y.z Infernalis cycle. Prior to that, versions looked with 0.y for development releases and 0.y.z for stable series.

Each development release (x.0.z) freezes the master development branch and applies before it is released. Once released, there is no effort to backport fixes; developer focus is on the next development release which is usually only a few weeks away.

• Development release every 8 to 12 weeks

• Intended for testing, not production deployments

• Full integration testing

• Upgrade testing from the last stable release(s)

• Every effort is made to allow offline upgrades from previous development releases (meaning you can stop all daemons, upgrade, and restart). No attempt is made to support online rolling upgrades between development releases. This facilitates deployment of development releases on non-production test clusters without repopulating them with data.

There is a feature release roughly eight (8) weeks prior to the planned initial stable release, after which focus shifts to stabilization and bug fixes only.

• Release candidate release every 1-2 weeks

• Intended for final testing and validation of the upcoming stable release

Once the initial stable release is made (x.2.0), there are semi-regular bug-fix point releases with bug fixes and (occasionally) small feature backports. Bug fixes are accumulated and included in the next point release.

• Stable point release every 4 to 6 weeks

• Intended for production deployments

• Online, rolling upgrade support and testing from the last two (2) stable release(s) (starting from Luminous).

• Online, rolling upgrade support and testing from prior stable point releases

For each stable release:

• Integration and upgrade tests are run on a regular basis and analyzed by Ceph developers.

• Issues fixed in the development branch (master) are scheduled to be backported.

• When an issue found in the stable release is , it is triaged by Ceph developers.

• The stable releases and backport team publishes including fixes that have been backported to the stable release.

The lifetime of a stable release series is calculated to be approximately 24 months (i.e., two 12 month release cycles) after the month of the first release. For example, Mimic (13.2.z) will reach end of life (EOL) shortly after Octopus (15.2.0) is released. The lifetime of a release may vary because it depends on how quickly the stable releases are published.

In the case of Jewel and Kraken, the lifetime was slightly different than described above. Prior to Luminous, only every other stable release was an “LTS” release. Therefore,

• Upgrade scenarios “Jewel -> Kraken -> Luminous” and “Jewel -> Luminous” were expected to work.

• Upgrades from Jewel or Kraken must upgrade to Luminous first before proceeding further (e.g., Kraken -> Luminous -> Mimic but not Kraken -> Mimic).

• Jewel was maintained until Mimic was released (June 2018).

Detailed information on all releases, past and present, can be found at