Evolving our releases

The Atomia team is back from Swedish summer and vacation. It has been great but now August is here and it is time for the first update of the second half of 2017.

Before summer we made some changes to our release management that we would like to share.

Previously we have been accumulating bug fixes for our two major yearly releases, only backporting if necessary. Due to improvements in release management, the product itself and an increase in available resources we are now able to evolve this strategy to a new and improved one. Starting from June this year we have been releasing updates each week. These updates contain bug corrections and smaller improvement but no breaking changes, so they should be completely safe to install even if you have a lot of customizations or integrations. However if you are uncertain or see a risk please consult with our support or account management.

Now on to feature releases. The first major change is that they will be smaller, as we have released most of the bug fixes and also the improvements that we deem safe to include in the weekly updates. The second change merely affects your planning calendar. We are shifting the releases to October and April (just like Ubuntu), instead of September and March like before. The reason is practical, it was felt tight to release just a month after summer and customers usually pushed the upgrade to October anyways. And since we want 6 months feature releases, March becomes April because September became October :).

To summarize, our plan and ambition is to release a bug fix + improvement update every week and the main feature releases get shifted one month to October and April. We hope this will benefit everyone, if there are any questions please reach out to us through your established contacts or by dropping us a email at [email protected].