Releases and maintenance

This section describes the collections release dates, dependency versions and End of Life dates (EOL) and support coverage.

The ibm_zos_core collection is developed and released on a flexible release cycle; generally, each quarter a beta is released followed by a GA version. Occasionally, the cycle may be extended to properly implement and test larger changes before a new release is made available.

End of Life for this collection is generally a 2-year cycle unless a dependency reaches EOL prior to the 2 years. For example, if a collection has released and a dependency reaches EOL 1 year later, then the collection will EOL at the same time as the dependency, 1 year later.

Life Cycle Phase

To encourage the adoption of new features while keeping the high standard of stability inherent, support is divided into life cycle phases; full support which covers the first year and maintenance support which covers the second year.

Life Cycle Phase

Full Support

Maintenance Support

Critical security fixes

Yes

Yes

Bug fixes by severity

Critical and high severity issues

Critical severity issues

Severities

Severity 1 (Critical): A problem that severely impacts your use of the software in a production environment (such as loss of production data or in which your production systems are not functioning). The situation halts your business operations and no procedural workaround exists.

Severity 2 (high): A problem where the software is functioning but your use in a production environment is severely reduced. The situation is causing a high impact to portions of your business operations and no procedural workaround exists.

Severity 3 (medium): A problem that involves partial, non-critical loss of use of the software in a production environment or development environment and your business continues to function, including by using a procedural workaround.

Severity 4 (low): A general usage question, reporting of a documentation error, or recommendation for a future product enhancement or modification.

Severities 3 and 4 are generally addressed in subsequent releases to ensure a high standard of stability remains available for production environments.

Support Matrix

These are the component versions available when the collection was made generally available (GA). The underlying component version is likely to change as it reaches EOL, thus components must be a version that is currently supported.

For example, if a collection releases with a minimum version of ansible-core 2.14.0 (Ansible 7.0) and later this enters into EOL, then a newer supported version of ansible-core (Ansible) must be selected. When choosing a newer ansible-core (Ansible) version, review the ansible-core support matrix to select the appropriate dependencies. This is important to note, different releases of ansible-core can require newer control node and managed node dependencies such as is the case with Python.

If the control node is Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), review the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Life Cycle to select a supported AAP version.

For IBM product lifecycle information, you can search for products using a product name, version or ID. For example, to view IBM’s Open Enterprise SDK for Python lifecycle, search on product ID 5655-PYT, and for Z Open Automation Utilities lifecycle, search on product ID 5698-PA1.

The z/OS managed node includes several shells, currently the only supported shell is the z/OS Shell located in path /bin/sh. To configure which shell the ansible control node will use on the target machine, set inventory variable ansible_shell_executable.

ansible_shell_executable: /bin/sh

Version

Controller

Managed Node

GA

End of Life

1.13.x

TBD

TBD

1.12.x

6 Dec 2024

6 Dec 2026

1.11.x

1 Oct 2024

1 Oct 2026

1.10.x

21 June 2024

21 June 2026

1.9.x

05 Feb 2024

30 April 2025

1.8.x

13 Dec 2023

30 April 2025

1.7.x

10 Oct 2023

30 April 2025

1.6.x

28 June 2023

30 April 2025

1.5.x

25 April 2023

25 April 2025