The journey of WSO2 Updates
As per the general understanding, fast growing technologies often require updates and patches in order to stay afloat with new technological and security enhancements to provide users with better technological solutions.
WSO2 as an open-source service provide delivers updates in two different ways.
- Updates for the WSO2 subscribers via the secure mechanism.
- Updates via GitHub to the open source users.
The subscribers receives the updates immediately through the WSO2 updates mechanism where the open source users will have to wait for the next release. By having an active subscription the subscribers have the advantage of receiving the updates immediately and ensuring that they have the latest security standard and features. On contrary, the open-source users have to wait for the next release on the GitHub or they have to apply the fixes by themselves.
WSO2 Updates Journey
- WUM 1.0 (Released in 2016)
- This is the initial release of the WSO2 Update Manager (WUM) which was release in 2016.
- Applying this method, the users have to download the WUM separately and download the updates and apply them in the deployment separately.
- This method technically produces a completely new product pack each time when the update command is executed.
2. WUM 2.0 (Released in 2018)
- This is the next version of WUM 1.0 which consists of feature additions and improvements.
- In terms of the usages it is similar to WUM 1.0
3. WUM 3.0 (Released in 2018)
- This new version of WUM, has the advantage of applying the updates partially.
- WSO2 uses shared components across it products, in the past WUM versions, separate updates needs to be created for each product regardless of shared component or not, but in WUM 3.0 a single update is being applied fully or partially to other products as applicable.
- In terms of the usages it is similar to the previous mechanisms.
4. In-place update tool (Released in 2018)
- The In-place update tool consists of all improvements in WUM 3.0.
- With this mechanism each pack consists the update tool with in the pack in the <productHome>/bin directory (update_<os>).
- Also updates are already customized product pack by resolving merge conflicts. (no new product pack is need to be created).
5. Updates 2.0 (Released in 2020)
- Updates 2.0 is the newest update delivery model that contains many feature additions and improvements to the previous models.
- This model enables the users to download only the effective change required in bringing the product pack to the desired update level.
- WSO2 Updates 2.0 has the ability to apply the hotfixes as the users prefer with proper versioning of the components that have been updated.
- As Updates 2.0 mechanism has taken a new and effective approach to the way updates are applied to WSO2 products. WSO2 considered all previous models (WUM and In-place) as Updates 1.0 and named the new model as Updates 2.0.
- More on how WSO2 Updates 2.0 operates can be found in the references.
Note: The version migration has its own method based on the type of subscriptions (i.e., Open source to subscribed version or Vx.x.x to Vx.x.1), the documentation can be found in the relevant product documents.
It is important to have an active WSO2 subscription to secure the services against security threats as well as receive software improvements and enhancements instantly.
References
[1] https://wso2.com/wum/download/ (decommissioned)
[2] https://updates.docs.wso2.com/en/latest
[3] https://wso2.com/blogs/thesource/how-to-migrate-from-the-open-source-wso2-identity-server/
