Supported Releases

This page lists the status, timeline and policy for currently supported releases.

Each release is supported for a period of four months, and we create a new release every two months.

Supported releases

Upcoming releases

The ~ sign is used when the date is uncertain and might change; the “EOL” abbreviation stands for End Of Life.

Old releases

You can find available releases on the releases page. You can find the release notes for each minor release here, and the upgrade instructions are here. The cert-manager release process is documented on the release-process page.

Support policy

What we mean by support

Our support window is four months for each release branch. In the below diagram, release-1.2 is an example of a release branch. The support window corresponds to the two latest releases, given that we produce a new final release every two months. We offer two types of support:

• Technical support,
• Security and bug fixes.

For example, imagining that the latest release is v1.2.0, you can expect support for both v1.2.0 and v1.1.0. Only the last patch release of each branch is actually supported.

   v1.0.0                                                          ^
 Sep 2, 2020                                                       | UNSUPPORTED
------+---------------------------------------------> release-1.0  | RELEASES
       \                                                           v
        \
         \       v1.1.0
          \    Nov 24, 2021                                        ^
           ---------+-------------------------------> release-1.1  |
                     \                                             | SUPPORTED
                      \                                            | RELEASES
                       \         v1.2.0                            | = the two
                        \      Feb 10, 2021                        |   last
                         ------------+--------------> release-1.2  |   releases
                                      \                            v
                                       \
                                        \
                                         \
                                          -----------> master branch
                                                       April 1, 2021

Technical support

Technical assistance is offered on a best-effort basis for supported releases only. You can request support from the community on Kubernetes Slack (in the #cert-manager channel), using GitHub Discussions or using the cert-manager-dev Google group.

Security and bug fixes

We back-port important bug fixes — including security fixes — to all currently supported releases.

• Security issues,
• Critical bugs,
• Long-standing bugs.

Security issues

Security issues are fixed as soon as possible. They get back-ported to the last two releases, and a new patch release is immediately created for them.

Critical bugs

Critical bugs include both regression bugs as well as upgrade bugs.

Regressions are functionalities that worked in a previous release but no longer work. #3393 and #2857 are two examples of regressions.

Upgrade bugs are issues (often Helm-related) preventing users from upgrading to currently supported releases from earlier releases of cert-manager. #3882 and #3644 are examples of upgrade bugs.

Note that intentional breaking changes do not belong to this category.

Once merged to the master branch, fixes for critical bugs are not immediately back-ported. Instead, we wait until the next final release for triggering a patch release. The patch release will be made for all supported release, but note that since we do only support the two last releases, a single patch release is made for the last release.

In the example below, the release branches release-1.2 and release-1.3 are the two supported releases at the time of the release of 1.3.0, which means that critical bug fixes 1 and 2 will only be back-ported to release-1.2 and not to release-1.1:

   v1.2.1                                v1.2.2
------+-------------------------------------+-----------> release-1.2
       \      backport ^  backport ^        ^
        \     commit  /   commit  /         | v1.2.2 is created
         \           /           /          | along with v1.3.0
          \         /           /
           \       /           /
            \     /           /          v1.3.0
             --------master-----------------+-----------> release-1.3
                 ^           ^               \
                 |           |                \
                 |           |                 \
           critical      critical               \
           bug fix 1     bug fix 2               \
           merged to     merged to                \
           master        master                    ------> master

Long-standing bugs

Long-standing bug: sometimes a bug exists for a long time, and may have known workarounds. #3444 is an example of a long-standing bug.

Where we feel that back-porting would be difficult or might be a stability risk to clusters running cert-manager, we’ll make the fix in a major release but avoid back-porting the fix.

Breaking changes

Breaking changes are changes that intentionally break the cert-manager Kubernetes API or the command line flags. We avoid making breaking changes where possible, and where they’re required we’ll give as much notice as possible.

How we determine supported Kubernetes versions

The list of supported Kubernetes versions displayed in the Supported Releases section depends on what the cert-manager maintainers think is reasonable to support and to test.

Our testing coverage is:

The oldest Kubernetes release supported by cert-manager is 1.16, as we want to be supporting most commercial Kubernetes offerings.

*As of 2021-05-25.

Terminology

The term “release” (or “minor release”) refers to one minor version of cert-manager. For example, 1.2 and 1.3 are two releases. Note that we do not use the prefix v for releases (just “1.2”). This is because releases are not used as git tags.

Patch releases use the v prefix (e.g., v1.2.0, v1.3.1…) since one patch release = one git tag. The initial patch release is called “final release”:

*For maintainers: each release has an associated long-lived branch that we call the “release branch”. For example, release-1.2 is the release branch for release 1.2.

**Pre-releases (e.g., v1.3.0-alpha.0) don’t have a corresponding release (e.g., 1.3) since a release only exists after a final release (e.g., v1.3.0) has been created.

Our naming scheme mostly follows Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 with v prepended to git tags and docker images:

v<major>.<minor>.<patch>

where <minor> is increased for each release, and <patch> counts the number of patches for the current <minor> release. A patch is usually a small change relative to the <minor> release.