Starting from Plesk Obsidian (major version 18), Plesk is moving away from long periods of time between major releases. Hence, taking the continuous delivery approach. Just like your mobile phone gets periodic updates, your Plesk server will also receive Plesk Obsidian auto-updates each month.
On July 8, we enabled the automatic updates for our Partners and introduced additional functionalities in Partner Central. Thus allowing us to schedule updates for specific days of the week. You can get more info in our partner auto-updates article here.
Automatic updates for the previous Plesk version (Onyx) became available for Partners earlier this year. And this resulted in the highest last version adoption growth in Plesk so far. From July to September 2019, the number of servers running Onyx 17.8 increased by 13% after activating automatic updates.
Plesk Servers by Version Distribution
Short Releases in Plesk Obsidian
From Plesk Obsidian onwards, the release tiers used before – Early adopters, General release and Later adopter release – become obsolete. Starting from major version 18, Plesk will ship monthly updates to your Plesk server(s). The only supported version will be the major version 18. So, we will support the last minor version and the version preceding Plesk Obsidian, including of course, the major version itself. For more details, please refer to the Plesk Lifecycle Policy.
Weekly updates with patches and bug fixes are also a thing of the past. Because everything including new Obsidian features will come directly through the regular monthly updates.
Plesk Obsidian Auto-updates: Why Are We Doing This?
There are three main reasons behind the Plesk Obsidian Auto-updates decision:
- Delivering new features to our Partners will be faster and more regular.
- We’re going for simplified alignment with Plesk extensions development.
- We don’t want our Partners to worry about staying on the latest version.
Once a Partner opted for an auto-update, their servers will automatically get on the latest updated version.
Coming Soon: New Controls in Partner Central & Plesk
Currently, in Partner Central, Partners can select the weekdays when Plesk can install automatic updates. Soon we’ll be adding further customization settings for updates scheduling.
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3 Comments
This is a very good development and I’m in total support.
Totally against it.
“Just like your mobile phone gets periodic updates”: Are you crazy to make that comparison? we’re not talking about something you can just restart like a phone! Plesk is used for production servers that ideally run a year and more without interruption.
“Weekly updates with patches and bug fixes are also a thing of the past. Because everything including new Obsidian features will come directly through the regular monthly updates.” I hope you exclude security updates from that.
Hey Not Happy,
We strive to make Plesk usable for all audiences, even less technical users, so comparisons like this are done intentionally to communicate effectively. In KAPC, our partners can select the week days when automatic updates can be installed on production servers. This was done specifically to give you the ability to update servers whenever you choose, for example, during weekdays. Moreover, with Plesk Obsidian you can also specify time frames for when the server can be automatically updated.
Please refer to: https://docs.plesk.com/en-US/obsidian/administrator-guide/plesk-updates.59215/ – Section: ‘Setting Time for Installing Automatic Plesk Updates’ for further details on the topic 🙂
Regarding security updates, we use best practices and our own discretion to provide the best for our users. So far, we have not had any security issues, however, in the event we do get any, we’ll likely release it through Hotfix, and not via security updates. Hope this answers your question!