Dwarfguard versions, available releases and release policy
Dwarfguard is currently in its 'early' versions (0.x). That means it is:
- Production ready for small to mid deployments (up to 40000 devices)
- Feature-ready for the basic Monitoring-Alerting-Management use cases
- Supports the initial set of device types (Advantech cellular routers (ICR OS), limited support for Teltonika cellular routers (RutOS), generic Linux OS boxes, limited support for OpenWRT devices)
Below you can find the overview of released and planned versions, together with description of releasing policy and basic release test set that is checked against every production release of Dwarfguard.
Dwarfguard versions table
| Version | Availability | Support | Audience | Release date | Release page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.8.2 | Actual | Supported | General | 2024/06/07 | Link |
| 0.8.1 | Obsolete | Supported | General | 2024/03/10 | Link |
| 0.8.0 | Obsolete | Supported | General | 2023/11/15 | Link |
| 0.7.4 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2023/06/26 | Link |
| 0.7.3 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2023/04/15 | Link |
| 0.7.2 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2023/03/01 | Link |
| 0.7.1 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2023/01/24 | Link |
| 0.7.0 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2023/01/15 | Link |
| 0.6.1 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2022/12/06 | Link |
| 0.6.0 | No | EOL | Early customers | 2022/10/30 | Link |
| 0.5.0 | No | EOL | Beta testers | 2022/02/17 | |
| 0.4.0 | No | EOL | Beta testers | 2021/12/12 |
Dwarfguard versions roadmap
| Version | Brand | Type | Planned date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.8.x | DT | Support 0.8 | until 0.9.0 |
| 0.9.0 | DT | Feature | 2024 |
| 1.0.0 | DT | Feature | 2024 |
Dwarfguard versioning policy
Dwarfguard follows a typical versioning scheme. Each version is composed of three numbers, first being called major release number, second minor release number and the last patchlevel (the term bugfix version is common as well).
- major is typically a version that you buy license for. E.g. in usual case, if you buy license for version 1 as major, you could use the license on any minor version for the major 1 - e.g. 1.x.x. Also, the major release is done only when there are important new features included.
- minor is typically a version that brings improved features and also a new ones, but it is not revolutionary. Upgrading to a new minor version could incorporate some downtime and it could also result in a need of configuration changes depending on the amount and size of changes included. You may stay on the minor version as long as it is supported while still getting the security fixes.
- patchlevel covers bringing bugfixes and security fixes. A license for any version (even if bound only to the minor version) always includes upgrade to any security/bugfix release.
- As for the versions before Dwarfguard 1.0, the patchlevel versions do usually contain also some improvements or new functionality. The reason is that we are both supporting only the last released version and streamlining the new functionality development for our early adopters.
Dwarfguard release policy
Next to the automatic development testing, every release must pass release testing. Release testing differs to the regular testing in few aspects:
- is done on production deployment, not development deployment
- testing includes manual confirmation that all end-to-end scenarios are working
- includes upgrade testing for both single-deploy and multi-deploy cases
The testing scenarios may be split into several areas:
- Deployment testing
- Tests ability to deploy on all supported deploy platforms, verification that deployed finishes correctly.
- Setup testing
- Verifies that all startup configuration can be executed and that the resulting configuration behaves as expected.
- Agent-device compatibility testing
- Tests that new devices can be added to the system using the released versions of agents and respective agents functionality including all data send and received in the system.
- Upgrade testing
- Tests that upgrade path from the previous to actual release is supported and data are migrated correctly.
- Tests that old agents can upgrade to new agents.
- End-to-end scenario testing
- Aims to verify particular functionality by executing defined end-to-end scenario test.
- Performance testing
- Verifies that Dwarfguard performance is acceptable for production usage and provides comparison of different setups.
Follow to Testing if interested to read more information or check out performance testing results or recommended HW/setup for particular Dwarfguard version and number of devices.