CF Final stable GA for 6.15.x

[veneet raina]

Dear Atlassian team/Community,

  We have been facing a lot of issues with continuous security advisories been sent by Atl,.

and asking for frequent minor version upgrades.

We are currently on 6.15.4 CF version and want to know the final GA stable build available for the same Major release so that we do not end up with more upgrade activity in short to long term

Appreciate prompt response on the same.

Regards

V

[Daniel Eads]

Hi Veneet,

I understand you're looking to get a little more stability around release versions to reduce the workload on your team handling upgrades.

There's a few areas I'd like to draw your attention to that might help in this area.

Enterprise releases

Firstly, Atlassian offers Enterprise Releases which are essentially a long-term supported version of the product. We guarantee security updates to these versions for two years from the initial release on that branch. The last Enterprise release of Confluence was 6.13 and we expect the next version to be announced sometime around Q4 of this year. You get the benefit of stability with these releases; security updates will not require you to do a major upgrade, only the small bugfix version to patch the security advisory. Doing these upgrades takes significantly less time than a full dev/test/UAT/test/release style deployment that a major version might need.

Data Center & Zero Downtime Upgrades

The Data Center deployments of our products allow you to have multiple nodes that you can upgrade independently. This allows you to upgrade without causing any downtime for your users. In environments where uptime is critical, zero downtime upgrades let your system administrators handle upgrades on their own schedule without causing disruption to your business.

Cloud migration

In Atlassian Cloud, security is handled by Atlassian and transparent to your team. There's no time investment in patching for security advisories, as Cloud is automatically kept up to date with the latest security fixes without any effort on your part. If upgrades are enough of a disruption to your team to be a major hinderance, I encourage you to check out if Cloud has the features your team needs.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the advisories typically contain mitigations you can apply to defer an upgrade. In the latest security advisory, there is a Mitigation section that details action you can take to reduce the risk of a malicious actor gaining access to files on your Server instance. While we recommend upgrading as the safest course of action, these mitigations can be helpful while working on an upgrade or migration plan.

Cheers,
Daniel