Why is Long-Term Support (LTS) so significant?
Previous to this release, each Prometheus version had a six-week life-cycle. That means that if you wanted to stay up-to-date with the latest features and bug fixes, you needed to update your Prometheus server every six weeks or so.
Upgrading isn’t always as easy as clicking on a button. With Prometheus growth, more and more companies depend on Prometheus as the key component of their monitoring infrastructure, and they can’t face the risk that new features and enhancements also bring regressions, requiring them to upgrade again. That’s why Prometheus is adding LTS releases to their release cycle.
Prometheus LTS releases will bring bug, security, and documentation fixes, so companies limit the risks of upgrades while having the Prometheus server still up-to-date.
So, you won’t have the latest Prometheus features, but you’ll know that upgrading to the next 2.37 fix release will be straightforward.
The Prometheus community is getting more and more mature
2022 is a great year for the Prometheus community. Last KubeCon EU in Valencia, the CNCF announced the Prometheus Associate Certification, which is currently in beta. This allows engineers to demonstrate their proficiency in the Prometheus ecosystem and cloud native observability concepts. Now, Prometheus is announcing a LTS release.
The release of these new LTS versions means that, now, every time the community fixes bugs and security issues in Prometheus, the maintainers will add these fixes both in the latest Prometheus minor and in the latest LTS version.
This extra effort is a serious investment in the Prometheus maturity that will bring more stability to the vast number of companies and projects using Prometheus.
Some nice changes included in Prometheus 2.37
This release also includes other nice changes, like a new built-in service discovery for HashiCorp Nomad, and an enhancement that allows attaching node labels for endpoint roles in the Kubernetes service discovery.
You can find the full list of changes in the official release notes of Prometheus 2.37.