Accelerating Innovation: Announcing Changes to Community Edition of Hazelcast Platform

Our community has been core to Hazelcast since it was founded more than a decade ago. As our product has evolved from an in-memory data grid and stream processing engine to a unified real-time data platform, community members have been our most prominent champions guiding us over the years. Throughout this time, the adoption of Hazelcast Platform Community Edition has grown significantly, especially in the last two years with the introduction of v5.0.

In keeping with the true ethos of open-source, we’ve never sought to monetize the Hazelcast Platform Community Edition, nor do we plan to monetize anything developed by contributors or third-party projects.

Today, we’re announcing some changes that may affect some of our open-source users. The goal is to tightly align our R&D investment priorities with the needs of our Global 2000 customers and the global community.

Why the Change

The simple answer is “focus.”

Hazelcast R&D must serve its community and commercial users. When use cases are considered, each group’s respective needs diverge. For example, compare the requirements of a frequent Community Edition use case, such as session caching, with a mission-critical enterprise use case, such as cross-border payment processing or real-time fraud detection.

Further, the AI era is increasing the expectations for critical functionality such as:

• AI processing
• Faster data integration at a lower cost
• RTO/RPO-zero goals, and
• Simplicity of use

As a result, we must align our R&D to continue supporting our community and the advanced needs of our enterprise customers.

What Is Not Changing

• Our license will remain Apache 2.0
• The delivery of Community Edition releases on a major/minor schedule
• Our continued support of the global community through developer relations activities

What Is Changing in Hazelcast Platform Community Edition

CVE Patches
With the release of Hazelcast Platform 5.4, Enterprise customers will receive Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) patches as soon as they are ready to ensure they comply with their industry’s regulatory requirements. In the Community Edition, patches to CVEs will be remedied in major and minor releases only (e.g. x.0, x.1, x.2, etc.). 

Kubernetes Support
To focus on the needs of managing all aspects of Hazelcast Platform, especially the Enterprise Edition features for mission-critical environments, our engineering resources will focus on delivering the highest quality Kubernetes functionality to our customers. With the release of Hazelcast Platform 5.5, Hazelcast Operator and its cluster creation capabilities will no longer be available in the Community Edition.

Customers can also expect ongoing maintenance and support for Helm Charts in the Enterprise Edition of Hazelcast Platform. Beginning with Hazelcast Platform 5.4, Helm Charts in the Community Edition will become community-driven.

CP Subsystem
The current iteration of the CP Subsystem in Hazelcast Platform provides strong data consistency in an in-memory architecture only. Because of its limited scope and lack of persistence, the open-source version of CP Subsystem is not recommended for mission-critical, production deployments. As a result, the existing CP Subsystem will be deprecated from the Community Edition and will no longer be supported as of Hazelcast Platform 5.5.

With Hazelcast Platform 5.4 Enterprise Edition, customers will gain access to a new, advanced version of the CP Subsystem with Persistence. The new capabilities of our Advanced CP Subsystem, a requirement for production environments, will ensure we deliver strong data consistency while supporting recovery goals in the event of a site-wide failure. 

Visit Hazelcast Platform Feature Comparison Page to learn about the differences between the Enterprise Edition and Community Edition.

When Does it Change

• Most of the changes will begin with our next release, Hazelcast Platform 5.4. The remaining updates will be implemented with the release of Hazelcast Platform 5.5.
• Hazelcast will continue to honor existing customer agreements to support Hazelcast Platform Community Edition and work closely with customers on a transition plan.

Contact us to learn more.