We have recently made some changes to the Chef supported platforms documentation to reflect some changes in our commercial product lifecycle and platform lifecycle policies. If you are not a commercial customer of Chef, these changes will not apply to you.
Product Lifecycle Changes
To the aforementioned page, and to our service-level agreement (SLA) for all contracts going forward, we have added definitions of product lifecycle phases such as Generally Available, Deprecated, and End-of-Life, with information about which products and versions thereof are in which phases.
Platform Lifecycle Changes
We have rewritten the supported platforms section of the aforementioned page to remove the use of “Foundational” and “Secondary” as distinguishing terminology. In short, platforms that are listed are commercially supported with no additional nuance.
At the same time, we are explicitly aligning our platform end-of-life with upstream operating system vendor end-of-life. Thus, we are providing tables that describe this alignment, as well as a notice of any upcoming ends-of-life as a result of those vendor timetables.
Doing this work identified three specific situations where we want to align with our approach:
- Enterprise Linux 5 (CentOS, RHEL, OEL) and AIX 6.1 both reached vendor end-of-life earlier this year. Due to their importance to customers, Chef will commercially support our products on these platforms until December 31, 2017.
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS reached vendor end-of-life on April 30, 2017. We are ceasing support and builds for this platform version effective immediately.
- We are going to be phasing out 32-bit FreeBSD builds by the end of September 2017. 64-bit FreeBSD support is unaffected.
Thank you for continuing to use Chef and we hope these changes bring additional clarity to our commercial support offering. If you have questions or concerns about the products you have deployed and their support status, please contact your Chef account representative.