Announcing a New Versioning Strategy

There’s a lot of changes happening at Event Store, with an increase in team size and a new vision for taking Event Store to the next level.

As part of these changes, we are updating our versioning and release strategy. This is to make it clearer to our customers when they can expect a new release and how long we will support it for.

From the next release (that would have been called V6) we will commit to putting out three supported releases a year in February, June and October.

These releases will be versioned with the year and month, for example:

• 20.2
• 20.6
• 20.10

The February and June releases will be normal releases and we will support them for a period of 4 months. The October release will be our long term support (LTS) release and we will support them for a period of 24 months, until October 2022.

There will still be patch releases between major versions to address bugs and possible performance improvements.

Alongside these new versions, we are introducing nightly and stable builds. We will release the nightly builds each day and the stable builds on a semi-regular basis. We won’t support these builds but they will offer our customers the opportunity to get early access to new features. It will also give some visibility as to what is expected in the next official release.

The nightly builds are already available and stable builds will become available soon after the 20.6 release.

Finally, we will be breaking cadence between the client and server releases. This is mainly due to us introducing clients in multiple languages such as .NET, Java, Go, and NodeJS. These clients will generally be versioned separately and newer clients will follow a more traditional strategy starting at v1.0.0. The latest released versions of each client will support both current and previous releases of EventStoreDB where possible. Each client will state in its own release notes which versions they support, and pre-release versions of clients may not support the full range of server versions.