At CloverDX we invest heavily into our products to provide our customers with new features as well as updates and fixes for existing functionality. In this article, we provide a quick overview of how we number our products and how our release processes work.
Release Numbering and Frequency
Our releases use simple version numbers to make it easy to determine which release is newer of whether a release is a bugfix release of production release: CloverDX X.Y.Z (for example CloverDX 5.9.1).
Depending on version number, we recognize multiple types of product releases:
- Major releases: identify big steps in product development. Major version numbers (X in the version number) change infrequently and typically mean large change to product functionality. For example, latest change (from 4 to 5) happened in 2018 when we rebranded the product from CloverETL to CloverDX and implemented completely new Server Console.
- Minor releases: indicate feature improvements or new functionality. These start at 0 for each major release and there is no limit to how many there can be (so we do not roll over to higher major release when 9 is reached).
- Maintenance releases: releases that contain various fixes, code corrections and other updates that do not add new functionality. In general, we have one maintenance release for each minor release, although this is not a hard rule.
If we look at our example release – CloverDX 5.9.1 – we can see that the major version is 5, minor is 9 and that it is a first maintenance release for CloverDX 5.9.
Version number are often shortened so for example instead of writing CloverDX 5.9.0, we use just CloverDX 5.9. This makes is very easy to spot maintenance releases since they are the only ones that have three numbers in their version.
We strive to deliver our releases on a predictable schedule so that our customers can plan their upgrades:
- We release four feature releases every year (a feature release is major or minor release). The releases are scheduled at the end of each calendar quarter (i. e. in March, June, September, and December every year).
- Maintenance releases are opportunistic. We do not produce them at any fixed schedule but rather based on severity and impact of the fixes included in each release.
- Each release is always released for every supported platform at once. That means that you can download Windows, Linux or Mac version of CloverDX as soon as we publish on our website. At the same time, we publish AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace offers and these typically become available in few days depending on how fast AWS or Microsoft approve the packages.
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