Percona Services Lifecycle Policy
Introduction
At Percona, our objective is to help our customers become successful through the open source database technology ecosystem. As new software becomes available in the ecosystem, we begin by providing Community Support. As the software is popularized and becomes more stable, we provide Operational Support. If engineers are needed to develop open source software, we provide Complete Support.
In the same manner, as a platform or piece of software becomes outdated or is declared “end of life (EOL),” we move our engineering efforts to developing the next major release or addressing the next important piece of open source software. EOL software gets shifted back to Operational Support, and finally (as it is largely phased out in the broader ecosystem) to Community Support.
There are many technologies in the wider open source database ecosystem, and not all of them are technologies in which Percona can reasonably maintain expertise. Unless explicitly stated somewhere in our policies and documentation, it can be assumed that technologies directly related to database servers that Percona supports are at the “Community Support” level. Anything that is not directly related to database servers that Percona supports can be assumed to not be supported (“No Support”). Below are examples that describe some things that are unsupported and why.
In all cases, Percona reserves the right to provide or not provide support for a particular technology for customers that are subscribed to particular service levels or tiers.
Side note about Consulting
While we recommend solutions to customers during A&D and similar engagements that Percona Support fully understands and supports, we can also perform custom engagements within the customer’s environment that encompass technologies normally outside the bounds of Percona Support limits. These types of engagements are generally handled by Percona Consulting. Once Percona Consulting agrees to the scope of the engagement, our consultants will work within your environment with the technologies therein as needed to achieve the desired deliverable engagement outcome.
Software and Platform States
| State | Packages/Builds | Percona Services |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Actively releasing new builds | Complete Support |
| Extended Support (ES) | New builds only for critical bug fixes or security issues | Complete Support |
| End of Life (EOL) | No new builds, existing downloads available | We will provide Operational Support for customers running EOL software on active platforms. For EOLed platforms, we provide Community Support. |
| Not Available (NA) | Builds were never available on this platform | No Support |
Spheres of Support
| State | Coverage Included |
|---|---|
Complete Support | Operational Support, Bug Fixes and Builds |
Operational Support | Documentation and blog articles published, internal training within our staff and deep Percona expertise |
Community Support | Some staff within Percona have expertise to assist you, but because this technology is either very new, very old or rarely used, it is not a focus for our training and documentation efforts |
No Support | Percona doesn’t support some technology within the wider ecosystem, and we will refer you to someone else who can assist you |
Examples of technologies that currently receive no support
- Database servers for which we don’t currently provide support
- Cassandra
- Redis
- Software that is not database-focused, so it is not something about which we maintain expertise
- Pacemaker
- DRBD
- Linux internals
- Areas within the ecosystem that are specialized in nature
- Security and compliance