What is Continuous Delivery in Seeq?
Seeq strives to offer the best possible experience for our customers, and is accordingly moving to Continuous Delivery (CD) to improve our response time for customer support, defect fixes, and new feature delivery. Continuous Delivery is a way to deploy new features and bug fixes to customers, ensuring that our users are always experiencing the latest and greatest that Seeq has to offer on a sustainable and predictable cadence.
Seeq allows customers to choose the level of stability and pace required for their Seeq deployments via release channels and maintenance windows. Seeq recommends maintenance window cadences based on the release channel, and encourages customers to customize their maintenance window to ensure that software updates minimize the impact on their operations.
RELEASE CHANNELS
default
This channel is recommended for most of our customers, and ensures that Seeq users are able to access the latest and greatest Seeq functionality when it’s available and stable.
A weekly maintenance cadence is recommended. The maintenance window cadence should not exceed two weeks.
slow
This channel is recommended for customers who have regulatory reporting needs.
A maintenance window of every three weeks is recommended. The cadence can not exceed two months.
Reach out to Seeq support if your organization would like to be on an early adopter channel and receive features with the intent to provide feedback.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What will my downtime look like?
Most of the time, you will incur less than 10 minutes of downtime. Rarely, downtime can last up to an hour (for example, when you transition to CD for the first time).
How do I know what’s changed?
New features and important bug fixes will be made available directly to Seeq users via Beamer, the communication tool in the bottom right hand corner of Seeq. Customers can also continue checking out the What’s New? page in our Knowledge Base, with the expectation that they’ll receive the features announced within a few weeks.
How do test servers work with CD?
Test servers are not needed or recommended with CD. Consider a test server only if you need to test your configuration of Seeq, such as any security models, custom connectors, historian upgrades, or scripts that your company relies on.
How often should I upgrade my remote agents?
Remote agents are forward compatible for one year starting from R59. Once all your remote agents have been upgraded to R59 (or R65 for Ignition customers), they do not need to be upgraded as frequently as the Seeq Server. Instead, we recommend upgrading remote agents at least once a quarter.
How do I manage custom connectors and SDK usage with CD? How can I be confident that my code won’t break?
We are increasingly stabilizing the core APIs that customers depend on, and deprecation warnings will be given one year in advance of breaking changes. Please follow API Changes - Seeq Community Website to be notified of important changes. If you have custom connectors, we strongly recommend leveraging the Connector Test Framework to ensure your connectors work seamlessly with Seeq.