Releases
Vespa is released every Monday through Thursday. Each public release has passed all functional and performance tests, and is already running the applications on our public cloud service.
For each Vespa release, the following artifacts are provided:
- Java artifacts for building Vespa applications on Maven Central
- Vespa RPMs on Fedora Copr
- Container images on Docker Hub
Releases:
Use the Vespa Factory to inspect the commits in each release:
Versions
Vespa uses semantic versioning. Each release is backwards compatible and supports live migration on running systems, provided they are running a version which is less than 2 months old. It is therefore a minor version number change. All new features are released on such minor versions. Every second year or so we make a major version change which removes previously deprecated functionality.
Java APIs, web service APIs and all application package constructs are supported through a major release and only removed on a new release if they are already marked deprecated.
Use of deprecated Java APIs will cause a warning on compilation, and use of deprecated application package constructs will cause a deprecation warning on deployment. Note that Java APIs come in two categories:
- Public APIs carry the compatibility guarantee and are visible from your code as well as in the javadoc
- Exported APIs are also visible from your code, but is not in the public Javadoc and carry no compatibility guarantee
Check the Javadoc list to verify that you are using public packages.
In addition, some public Java classes and methods are marked with the com.yahoo.api.annotations.Beta tag. These are under development and may still change before they stabilize.
Stored Data
Data written to Vespa is compatible between adjacent releases. For self-hosted systems, it may be necessary to upgrade through each minor release rather than in larger leaps to ensure Vespa can read existing data. This is a good practice in any case.