Payara Platform Product Lifecycle and End of Life Policy

Payara Services provides a long software lifecycle with support and maintenance over stated time periods for Payara Platform Enterprise products. The lifecycle allows Enterprise customers to plan and deploy their applications using Payara Platform, to reduce the level of change required for each major release over time, increasing stability and predictability and giving your team the peace of mind that comes with not having to upgrade frequently.

The Payara Platform lifecycle identifies the levels of support and maintenance for each release of that product over a period of time from the initial release.

Payara Platform software updates containing security and bug fixes are delivered via software patches released to individual Payara Enterprise customers as needed, or as part of a minor release. Feature enhancements and new features are generally introduced in minor and major releases—not as patches.

Payara strives to maintain compatibility across the full life cycle so that patches and minor releases are tested and qualified against prior releases, as well as provide compatibility with the initial major release (e.g. Payara Platform 6) but if incompatibilities arise, the team documents it in the release notes or reports the incompatibility as a bug. Major versions of the Payara Platform software attempt to maintain significant backward-compatibility with previous versions (e.g. Payara Server 6 endeavours to maintain backward compatibility with Payara Server 5) to aid with the migration of applications from one major release to another. An upgrade tool is available to assist Enterprise customers with updates from one minor version to the next.

Since Jakarta EE has introduced a new biannual release cadence, allowing it to incorporate features from the latest Java Long-Term Support (LTS) releases, new Payara Platform versions are currently released biannually to support each new release. Payara Platform’s product lifecycle is published to provide transparency and assist you with your planning, but sometimes must make changes to the policies due to end of life changes of a component or platform in the ecosystem that are outside of Payara’s control.