Enterprise support, development, and expertise from the co-founder, maintainers, and lead developers of Apiman.
Many enterprise users of Apiman want to remain on older versions for longer, with stability and maintenance preferred over new features, migration risk, and potentially breaking changes. These are different to the upstream, which moves much faster.
By default, we offer a clearly-defined support lifecycle with 4 years for each major version, with extended support also available as an extra service.
Patches produced under long-term support are not available in the upstream, as this is a considerable extra effort we provide for our customers.
BPL follows an industry standard support lifecycle involving 3 phases, during which we ensure you can continue to use older versions of Apiman and remain secure and supported.
When a new major version of Apiman becomes available upstream, we will let you know if and when it will become supported. In some cases, we will skip upstream versions that are very short-lived or less stable.
Subscribers are notified directly when relevant support-only patches and releases are available, including responsive security patches.
We are responsive to customer feedback and requests if support for a particular major version is important.
Full Support
All major and minor upgrades, all available security patches, plus qualified new features.
Qualified new features are features from newer versions of Apiman that BPL has carefully selected, assessed, and tested as being compatible.
Maintenance Support
All available security patches and critical bug fixes.
This ensures that everything keeps running smoothly, but we will not backport any new features.
Extended Life Support
Available as an add-on that is sold separately, you can extend maintenance for a further 2 years, and request high-priority fixes.
The following table outlines Black Parrot Lab's planned long-term support lifecycle for current major Apiman releases.
We provide support based upon the latest available minor and patch version for a given major release. We will always reach out to you when a new supported version is released, and help you keep up-to-date with minimal fuss. Updates are released as required by BPL, and each new supported minor release will aggregate all previous patches and fixes.
When a new major version of Apiman becomes available upstream, we will let you know if and when it will become supported. In some cases, we will skip upstream versions that are very short-lived or less stable. Let us know if a particular major version is important to your organisation.
We do our utmost to ensure stability in long-term supported versions of Apiman, but there may be rare cases where components and dependencies downstream of Apiman have been deprecated and/or impose breaking changes that are difficult to avoid.
We will work closely with you to mitigate any disruption if this were to occur, including exploring solutions such as maintaining our own versions of libraries and actively helping you migrate.
