This topic describes the lifecycle policies of ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition to help you understand the changes that occur during different phases of the ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition lifecycle, the impacts of the changes on your business, and the overall evolution plan of the service. This helps you efficiently schedule the service updates and upgrades to reduce risks.
Background information
As the ClickHouse open source community evolves, ClickHouse releases new versions that provide more benefits, such as improved performance, enhanced security, and a wider range of features. The ClickHouse open source community has gradually reduced support and maintenance for earlier ClickHouse versions. The ClickHouse community updates the long-term support (LTS) version every six months and maintains only the current LTS version and the previous LTS version. If you continue to use an earlier version of ClickHouse, you may encounter various issues and security and stability risks.
Lifecycle description of ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition
To make sure that you have enough time to upgrade the major engine versions of ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition, ApsaraDB for ClickHouse typically offers an additional year of maintenance beyond what is provided by the open source ClickHouse community. After the extension period ends, ApsaraDB for ClickHouse also discontinues the support for the expired engine versions.
The existing clusters of versions for which support is discontinued can still be used. You can upgrade, downgrade, renew, and unsubscribe these clusters.
For the versions for which support is discontinued, the following limits take effect:
Purchase is not allowed.
Iterative feature updates are no longer provided.
Engine version updates are no longer provided.
Only critical vulnerabilities and defects will be addressed.
The following table describes the end-of-support dates of different major versions of ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition. You can make scheduled plans based on the dates and select a proper version when you create a cluster, migrate a cluster, and upgrade a major version.
In the table, some dates are estimated. The estimated dates may be modified before the end-of-life (EOL) date of a version and the end-of-support date of ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition. The actual dates in the end-of-sale (EOS) announcements and notifications prevail.
Version | Release date in the ClickHouse community | Release date in ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition | End-of-support date in the ClickHouse community | Estimated end-of-support date in ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition |
19.15 | October 1, 2019 | December 12, 2019 | October 1, 2020 | April 16, 2021 |
20.3 | May 23, 2020 | June 4, 2020 | May 23, 2021 | October 28, 2022 |
20.8 | October 9, 2020 | November 26, 2020 | October 9, 2021 | October 28, 2022 |
21.8 | August 12, 2021 | November 26, 2021 | August 12, 2022 | April 24, 2024 |
22.8 | August 18, 2022 | October 28, 2022 | August 18, 2023 | N/A |
23.8 | August 31, 2023 | March 7, 2024 | August 31, 2024 | N/A |
Service commitments and suggestions
Three months before a critical lifecycle milestone in the service lifecycle is reached, we will notify the contacts configured within your Alibaba Cloud account by using a notification channel, such as announcements, internal messages, or emails.
Compatibility
ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition does not provide guaranteed compatibility across major versions. However, ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition ensures compatibility across major versions in terms of syntax, operations, and features, and sends notifications about potential compatibility issues by using documents or after-sale services. For more information, see Release notes.
ApsaraDB for ClickHouse Community-compatible Edition ensures compatibility across minor versions in the same major version in terms of syntax, operations, and features. We recommend that you update your cluster to the latest minor version of the current major version based on the assurance of compatibility.
Issue fixes
If your cluster does not run the latest version, we recommend that you upgrade the major version of the cluster or update the minor version of the cluster to resolve issues that may occur. The actual latest minor version described in the Release notes topic shall prevail.