TL;DR; The Spring portfolio enterprise support tier is aligning all support dates to Spring Boot and going to be extended for the last minor version of each major generation for an additional 5 years beyond the previous support arrangement providing 7 years of total support for those versions.

Upgrading is hard. We get that. Whether it be technical difficulties, prioritization of upgrades against other business priorities, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, etc. While we already offer one of the most generous and predictable support policies in the industry for open source frameworks with one year of free open source support and one additional year of enterprise support for each release, we also understand that when a new major generation comes around that upgrade experience can be daunting. In the past, it has also been a challenge for users to keep track of support dates given that they are all tied to the individual projects, leaving a complex enterprise project to have multiple dates to track.

Historically, Spring Framework has tried to help a bit by extending the support timeline on the last minor version of a major version to allow users more flexibility in when they do the upgrade. However, that policy has not been formalized or guaranteed. We are looking to change that.

New Support Timelines

Today we are announcing two key changes to the Spring portfolio enterprise support timelines. First, all the dates for enterprise support will align with Spring Boot going forward. This means that the support timelines for a given project that is included by Spring Boot as well as the Spring Cloud projects will be aligned with the support timeline for Spring Boot itself. This simplifies the understanding of support timelines so that the only date you need to track is the support dates for Spring Boot. Second, going forward, for the last minor version of a major generation (Spring Framework 6.2 for example is the last minor version of the 6.x generation), they will get an additional five years of enterprise support. This takes the end of life for Spring Framework 6.2 out from the end of 2027 to the middle of 2032. This aligns the support timeline for Spring Framework 6.2 with Spring Boot 3.5 which includes it. This change will go into effect immediately for all versions that are currently still under support (versions that align with Spring Boot 2.7 and Spring Boot 3.5).

While we want all of our users to be on the latest and greatest versions and have tooling to help you get there, we understand the challenges you face and hope this helps you navigate the complexities of keeping enterprise applications running in production.

To learn more about enterprise support for Spring, Tomcat, or Java you can contact us here: https://go-vmware.broadcom.com/contact-us. As always, we welcome your feedback in the comments!