Hi Nikhil!
That's a great question that we should probably do a better job
answering as a community. I think it depends on how Flipkart wants to
position itself wrt the HBase community.
If you want to "just use" HBase, our recommendation, AFAIK, is to use
whatever version our "stable" pointer is at. This should be a version
that we as a community believe has the right balance of features and
production use burn-in to work for a majority of HBase use cases. It
also should keep you on a line of releases that we as a community are
still providing bug fixes for around critical issues.
It's always available at this location:
http://www.apache.org/dist/hbase/stable/
Right now, that pointer is Apache HBase 1.4.9. The expectation, based
on a few dev@hbase discussions over the last several months, is that
when Apache HBase 1.5.0 comes out we'll update the stable pointer to
it. That RC is scheduled to close at the end of this week. Ideally,
upgrading along releases that have the stable pointer should be low
risk. My current understanding is that when a feature proves
sufficiently useful and unlikely to cause stabilization issues they'll
get backported to a new HBase 1.y release and eventually the stable
pointer will update to point at a release that includes it[1]. You
should expect that it will take a long time or specific action on your
part (backporting or testing) to get newer features if you deploy
based on the stable releases.
If you are planning to push the limits of HBase or if you are planning
to leverage it as a critical piece of business infrastructure and you
are planning to have an investment of folks working on it to match,
you'll be able to better influence the direction of the project and
leverage more aggressive or experimental improvements if you build
around the set of HBase 2 releases. At the moment, that means either
the latest Apache HBase 2.1.z if you need something in the next month,
or Apache HBase 2.2.0 if you either want to directly participate in
that release's vetting or you can wait until it is out. Note that so
far the HBase community has expressly discussed and decided not to
update the stable pointer to an HBase 2 release. You should expect
that there will be operational difficulties that require gaining a
deep understanding of internals[2] (which we as a community would love
to help out with) if you deploy based on newer-than-stable releases.
A brief aside to your earlier question about where releases are still
happening; specifically there still being 1.2 releases. I'm the
release manager for the 1.2 release line. Since it was the previous
stable release line (for 1.2.0 - 1.2.6) I offered to continue making
releases for ~6 months after we updated the stable pointer to a 1.4
release. I thought this provided a good-enough buffer for folks who
need to plan and execute upgrading. Each 1.2.z release announcement
starting with 1.2.7 has carried a message that said some version of
"you should upgrade to the stable pointer which is currently 1.4.x".
[1]:
dev@hbase thread
"[DISCUSS] No more release branches for 1.x, release from branch-1 directly"
https://s.apache.org/shSE
[2]:
dev@hbase thread
"[DISCUSS] Moving towards a branch-2 line that can get the 'stable' pointer."
https://s.apache.org/STA2
HBASE-21745
On Mon, Mar 4, 2019 at 9:38 AM Nikhil Bafna
wrote:
>
> So, are there any 1.x branches that are continuing to get new features?
>
> Looking at a 6 month view, should we (Flipkart) rather plan to develop (and
> start contributing) on 2.x branch, instead of 1.x branches?
>
>
> --
> Nikhil Bafna | 8095234263
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 4:43 PM Peter Somogyi wrote:
>
> > The current plan is to retire 2.0. The voting is in progress for 2.0.5 and
> > more releases are not planned unless critical bugs are discovered.
> >
> > On the 1.3 line there was a discussion for EOL, but the Francis (RM) would
> > like to continue that.
> >
> > HBase 1.5.0 is coming up shortly and you could also expect more bugfix
> > releases on 1.2.
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 6:38 AM Nikhil Bafna wrote:
> >
> > > We run Hbase 1.2.x in our production that has a set of patches &
> > backports.
> > >
> > > In the mailing list, I see discussions for EOL of 1.3 & 2.0.x. In another
> > > mailing list discussion, it was pointed out that "... targeting only bug
> > > fixes for branch-1, as version 1 approaches EOL"
> > >
> > > But, I see new releases happening on 1.2.x versions - which seems to be
> > > contradictory.
> > >
> > > What are the EOL plans for the active versions?
> > >
> >
