Feature Maturity

Understanding Mesosphere’s feature maturity lifecycle

Mesosphere DC/OS Feature Maturity Lifecycle

A Mesosphere DC/OS feature will progress through a multi-stage lifecycle. This lifecycle can be used to determine if and when a given feature is used for various stages of deployment. These stages of deployment can include, but are not limited to, development, testing, evaluation or production. In order to determine if a feature should be used, you should carefully examine the ramifications of using the feature based on its Maturity State as described below.

A feature can encompass Apps, Services, Frameworks, Components or Packages that are part of Mesosphere DC/OS or its catalog. The five Maturity States of a Mesosphere DC/OS feature are illustrated below and progress from left to right starting with Beta and ending with Decommissioned.

Five Maturity States

Figure 1. Feature maturity lifecycle

Beta

Features that are labeled Beta are aimed at consumers who want to have early exposure to a given feature. Typically, these features are primarily used for evaluation and non-production testing purposes or to provide feedback to Mesosphere.

  1. Beta features are ready for customer or end-user testing and early validation of features and functionality.
  2. Beta features may be changed, discontinued, or deprecated for any reason and at any time.
  3. Beta features are still evolving and may contain bugs, errors, defects, or may require further enhancements. A beta feature may not have its abilities or APIs finalized.
  4. Beta features may be subject to reduced or different security, compliance and privacy commitments.
  5. Beta features may be subject to reduced performance, scalability or capacity commitments.
  6. Beta features are not guaranteed to be promoted from Beta to GA.
  7. Feedback on beta features may be provided via non-standard channels like email, slack channels or community forums, based on testing, usage and experiences.

IMPORTANT: Any use of a Beta version or feature of Mesosphere DC/OS Enterprise is subject to the Evaluation Terms, to the exclusion of all other terms.

General Availability

A feature that is labeled Generally Available (GA) is recommended to be used by all consumers. A feature in this state of the maturity lifecycle should be considered for use in any customer deployment state including production.

  1. GA features are ready for testing, evaluation, application development and production usage by the customer.
  2. GA features may be continued to be enhanced and bugs or defects resolved.
  3. API modifications will be under version control (V1, V2 etc).
  4. For customers of DC/OS Enterprise, feedback and support should go through the methods outlined in the Mesosphere Support Terms.
  5. For customers of DC/OS Open Source, feedback should go through Community channels.
  6. GA feature modifications or maturity lifecycle changes can be found in the Release Notes.

Deprecated

A Deprecated feature is a feature for which Mesosphere no longer provides enhancements. The change in state may be due to, but not limited to, being superseded by a newer/different feature, a shift in the industry, or lack of customer interest. This may include Apps, Frameworks, Services or Components of Mesosphere DC/OS or versions of parts or access methods (such as APIs, CLI commands) of the Apps, Frameworks, Services or Components. You should consider migrating your applications or DC/OS cluster to use the newer feature.

  1. Enhancements to the feature should not be expected.
  2. Bugs may continue to be resolved based on factors including, but not limited to, severity, priority or if they have been addressed by the superseding feature.

Retired

A Retired feature is one that has reached the end of its maturity lifecycle within Mesosphere DC/OS but is still part of the product. Customers using a retired feature are strongly urged to migrate away from the retired feature and instead employ a GA feature, as Retired is the last state in the Mesosphere DC/OS lifecycle in which the feature is still present.

  1. Enhancements to the feature should not be expected.
  2. Bugs or defects should not be expected to be fixed.

Decommissioned

A Decommissioned feature is no longer available in current releases of DC/OS. The feature has since been removed from the current and future versions of DC/OS.

Prior Lifecycle Stages

Prior to DC/OS 1.10, GA features were called Stable features, and Beta features were called Experimental or Preview features.

Not a Warranty

The foregoing does not constitute a product warranty. Mesosphere disclaims all warranties, either express or implied, with respect to the software and specifically disclaims any warranty that the functions contained in the software will meet a user’s requirements or that the operation of the software will be uninterrupted or error free.