At Cribl, we take pride in doing things differently. Our Customers First mentality is at the heart of everything we do as an organization–from free education and sandboxes, community programs, and platforms, to streamlining legal reviews on contracts. We strive to solve problems from first principles – understanding root causes to build optimal experiences vs. piecemeal solutions together. We aim to be a partner—working with you to address your challenges holistically.
And that means we are committed to continuous innovation. But as with any organization looking to move forward and continuously deliver value for our customers, there are tradeoffs.
One such tradeoff for Cribl is deciding how far back to provide maintenance updates to our products, while also being able to effectively deliver and support new features and versions. As such, we’d like to share with you our release strategy.
What the Strategy Is
We provide software updates on a regular monthly cadence, alternating between feature and maintenance. Every other month, we ship new features as they become production-ready. Features that are not production-ready simply wait for the next feature release – i.e. in two months time.
One month after a feature release, we provide maintenance, security, and bug fixes only on the main code branch (N.X). Meaning, that we do not backport fixes to prior versions, nor do we provide patches or hotfixes to prior maintenance releases. Stated differently, our latest release is the highest quality and we always recommend updating as soon as practically possible.
Regardless of what version you are running, our Customer Support team is here for you. You can expect the same dedication to troubleshooting, investigating, and identifying the root cause of the problem no matter what version you are running. In a nutshell, we support our customers first, rather than just focusing on software versions.
Why This Strategy
This approach ensures that we are constantly making progress towards higher-quality software for all of our customers. We are able to maintain the high level of responsiveness that our customers have come to appreciate and expect while delivering timely fixes and introducing new features. By concentrating on current and upcoming versions, we can keep our engineering and support teams efficient, allowing us to pass along cost savings and offer improved, more robust solutions and services to our customers. Additionally, this approach enables us to maintain our monthly release cadence, an extraordinary achievement, especially when dealing with multiple enterprise products. Finally, by always looking ahead, we can stay innovation-focused and provide our customers with cutting-edge technology to unlock the value of all observability data.
For more on our innovation philosophy, check out this podcast featuring our founders.
For more on our customer’s first value, check out this blog: Customers First, Always!
To chat with our product managers about what’s next, hit up the #feature-request channel on Slack.
