Chapter 1. Software Releases and Long-Term Support (LTS)

Volt Active Data provides best-in-class throughput of ACID transactions, enabling intelligent streaming applications and real-time decision making. To maintain its industry leadership and help customers meet current and future business goals, Volt is constantly improving and expanding the its capabilities by adding new features.

At the same time, it is important to provide the most stable software possible for production use. So Volt provides frequent product updates to ensure timely and proactive solutions to potential issues within the software. Balancing cutting edge features with bug fixes is the primary goal of the Volt Active Data release strategy and, specifically, its Long-Term Support (LTS) designation as described in the following section.

The Release Schedule The latest releases of Volt Active Data usually contain a combination of new features and bug fixes for known issues in previous releases. Releases fall into three categories: Major releases (V1.0, V2.0, V3.0 etc.) Major releases are normally reserved for significant new features. They are also where older features are deprecated or removed. In particular, any incompatible or behavioral changes that require user action to complete the upgrade process are reserved for major releases. Point releases (V3.1, V3.2, V3.3 etc.) Point releases are normally only applied to the latest version of the software or LTS releases. On the latest release branch, point releases contain both bug fixes and new features under development. On LTS branches, point releases contain only bug fixes. Long-Term Support releases (LTS) For each major release, after a few point releases to stabilize the product we announce one point release as the Long-Term Support (LTS) release. This means this version will receive all applicable bug fixes for the full term of its support period, which is three years from its initial release. These bug fixes will be applied as minor updates to the point release (for example, if V11.4 is the LTS release, bug fix updates will be V11.4.1, V11.4.2 etc.). Note that the LTS releases receive bug fixes only, they do not receive any additional new features. New features are applied to the latest release branch only. The goal of the LTS release is to clearly identify the most stable version available for any major release. If you encounter any issues with point releases prior to the LTS release, we will ask you to update to the LTS release to receive the fixes you need.