Products reach the end of their Product Life Cycle for a number of reasons. These reasons may be due to market demands, technology innovation and development driving changes in the product, or the products simply mature over time and are replaced by functionally richer technology. While this is an established part of the overall product life cycle, Zephyr recognizes that end-of-life milestones often prompt companies to review the way in which such end-of-sale and end-of-life milestones impact Zephyr products. Zephyr's end-of-life policy helps customers better manage their end-of-life transition and understand the role that Zephyr can play in helping to upgrade and/or migrate.
General policy guidelines:
- Support will include the last three major release versions of Zephyr. This would be the current latest major release and two major releases behind that.
- A major version is any two digit release (ie. 5.0, 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3)
- Minor versions released after the oldest supported major releases ARE supported. Minor versions released below the oldest supported major release ARE NOT supported.
- A minor version is any three digit release (ie. 4.8.1, 5.0.3, 5.1.1)
- Versions that are no longer supported will receive no assistance from Zephyr staff but will retain access to all public Zephyr resources such as:
- Community Forums, Knowledge Base, etc.
- Limited Support will start for affected versions immediately upon a major release version and will continue for 3 months afterwards until the version is no longer supported. Limited Support license holders have access to Zephyr Support staff but will not receive development support in the form of patches, hot fixes, bug fixes, etc. It is recommended to use this time to plan for migration and/or upgrading.
- Full Support license holders have complete access to Zephyr Support staff and development support for patches, hot fixes, bug fixes, etc.
- Options within the Full and Limited Support stages are still dictated by the license holder's Support Package tier and require a valid active license.
- Updates to the current End-of-Life cycle are made with every major Zephyr release.
Please see below for a representation of the End-of-Life Policy:
| Zephyr Major Versions | Support Life-Cycle Stage |
|---|---|
| 6.3 | Full |
| 6.2 | Full |
| 6.1 | Full |
| 6.0 | Limited |
| 5.1 | None |
5.0 | None |
| 4.8 | None |
| 4.7 and Older | None |
This table depicts the End-of-Life Policy for when Zephyr 6.3 is released. At this point, Zephyr 6.0 will immediately enter the Limited Support window. Zephyr 5.x and older versions are already at the End-of-Life stage of the cycle and are no longer supported. Zephyr 6.1 and all versions released after are fully supported.