Support Policy

Learn about the support for Kong Ingress Controller software versions.

Version support for Kong Ingress Controller

Kong primarily follows semantic versioning (SemVer) for its products.

At Kong’s discretion a specific minor version can be marked as a LTS version. The LTS version is supported on a given distribution for the duration of the distribution’s lifecycle, or for 3 years from LTS release whichever comes sooner. LTS only receives security fixes or certain critical patches at the discretion of Kong. Kong guarantees that at any given time, there will be at least 1 active LTS Kong version.

LTS versions of Kong Ingress Controller are supported for 3 years after release. Standard versions are supported for 1 year after release.

Supported versions

Kong Ingress Controller versions

LTS releases are marked bold, and are supported for 3 years from release

Table 1: Version Support for Kong Ingress Controller

Bug fix guidelines

Unfortunately, all software is susceptible to bugs. Kong seeks to remedy bugs through a structured protocol as follows:

• Serious security vulnerabilities are treated with the utmost priority. See here for our security vulnerability reporting and remedy process, including how to report a vulnerability.

• Bugs which result in production outages or effective non-operation (such as catastrophic performance degradation) will be remedied through high priority bug fixes and provided in patch releases to the Latest Major/Minor Version Release of all currently supported Major Versions of the software and optionally ported to other versions at Kong’s discretion based on the severity and impact of the bug.

• Bugs which prevent the upgrade of a supported version to a more recent supported version will be remedied through high priority bug fixes and provided in the Latest Major/Minor Version Release of all currently supported Major Versions of the software and optionally ported to other versions at Kong’s discretion based on the severity and impact of the bug.

• Other bugs as well as feature requests will be assessed for severity and fixes or enhancements applied to versions at Kong’s discretion depending on the impact of the bug. Typically, these types of fixes and enhancements will only be applied to the most recent Minor Version in the most recent Major Version.

Customers with platinum or higher subscriptions may request fixes outside of the above and Kong will assess them at its sole discretion.

Deprecation guidelines

From time to time as part of the evolution of our products, we deprecate (in other words, remove or discontinue) product features or functionality.

We aim to provide customers with at least 6 months’ notice of the removal or phasing out of a significant feature or functionality. We may provide less or no notice if the change is necessary for security or legal reasons, though such situations should be rare. We may provide notice in our documentation, product update emails, or in-product notifications if applicable.

Once we’ve announced we will deprecate a significant feature or functionality, in general, we won’t extend or enhance the feature or functionality.

Additional terms

• The above is a summary only and is qualified by Kong’s Support and Maintenance Policy.
• The above applies to Kong standard software builds only.

Helm chart compatibility

The Helm chart is designed to be version agnostic with regards to support for any particular Kong Gateway, Kong Ingress Controller, or Kubernetes version. When possible, it detects those versions and disables incompatible functionality. Note that while the chart indicates a single app version, this is just the default Kong Gateway release that chart release uses. Helm’s app version metadata does not support indicating a range.

New chart releases are, however, tested against only a select group of recent dependency and Kubernetes versions, and may have unknown compatibility problems with older versions. If you discover a set of incompatible versions where dependencies are not past their end of support, please file an issue with your Kong Gateway, Kong Ingress Controller, and Kubernetes versions and any special values.yaml configuration needed to trigger the problem. Some issues may require using an older chart version for LTS releases of other products, in which case Kong can backport fixes to an older chart release as needed.

The chart includes custom resource definitions (CRDs) that are not compatible with older Kubernetes versions.

Helm’s CRD management does not support the same version-aware logic used elsewhere to provide older-version compatibility, so the chart cannot install the definitions for the configured controller version. If you use an older version of Kong Ingress Controller compatible with your Kubernetes version, you can install its definitions separately. For example, to install the 2.5.1 definitions and install with Helm’s CRD installer disabled:

kubectl kustomize https://github.com/Kong/kubernetes-ingress-controller/config/crd?ref=v2.5.1 | kubectl apply -f -

helm install myrelease kong/ingress --skip-crds

Note that even when you do use Helm to install CRDs, Helm does not update CRDs when running helm upgrade. You must separately install updated CRDs using the above kubectl command versions before running a helm upgrade that installs a newer controller release.

See also

• Version support policy for Kong Gateway
• Version support policy for Kong Mesh