Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS update life cycle

Red Hat provides a published product life cycle for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS in order for customers and partners to effectively plan, deploy, and support their applications running on the platform. Red Hat publishes this life cycle to provide as much transparency as possible and might make exceptions from these policies as conflicts arise.

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS is a managed instance of Red Hat OpenShift and maintains an independent release schedule. More details about the managed offering can be found in the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS service definition. The availability of Security Advisories and Bug Fix Advisories for a specific version are dependent upon the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform life cycle policy and subject to the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS maintenance schedule.

Major versions of Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, for example version 4, are supported for one year following the release of a subsequent major version or the retirement of the product.

Starting with the 4.8 OpenShift Container Platform minor version, Red Hat supports all minor versions for at least a 16 month period following general availability of the given minor version. Patch versions are not affected by the support period.

Customers are notified 60, 30, and 15 days before the end of the support period. Clusters must be upgraded to the latest patch version of the oldest supported minor version before the end of the support period, or the cluster will enter a "Limited Support" status.

During the period in which a minor version is supported, Red Hat supports all OpenShift Container Platform patch versions unless otherwise specified.

For reasons of platform security and stability, a patch release may be deprecated, which would prevent installations of that release and trigger mandatory upgrades off that release.

When a cluster transitions to a Limited Support status, Red Hat no longer proactively monitors the cluster, the SLA is no longer applicable, and credits requested against the SLA are denied. It does not mean that you no longer have product support. In some cases, the cluster can return to a fully-supported status if you remediate the violating factors. However, in other cases, you might have to delete and recreate the cluster.

A cluster might transition to a Limited Support status for many reasons, including the following scenarios:

If you have questions about a specific action that might cause a cluster to transition to a Limited Support status or need further assistance, open a support ticket.

Red Hat reserves the right to add or remove new or existing versions, or delay upcoming minor release versions, that have been identified to have one or more critical production impacting bugs or security issues without advance notice.

While Red Hat recommends installation of the latest support release, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS supports installation of any supported release as covered by the preceding policy.

If a critical or important CVE, or other bug identified by Red Hat, significantly impacts the security or stability of the cluster, the customer must upgrade to the next supported patch release within two business days.

In extreme circumstances and based on Red Hat’s assessment of the CVE criticality to the environment, Red Hat will notify customers that they have two business days to schedule or manually update their cluster to the latest, secure patch release. In the case that an update is not performed after two business days, Red Hat will automatically update the cluster to the latest, secure patch release to mitigate potential security breach(es) or instability. Red Hat might, at its own discretion, temporarily delay an automated update if requested by a customer through a support case.