Rutgers.eduIn an effort to continually improve Canvas, Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, releases Canvas upgrades along with Release Notes; previously these releases occurred every three weeks. The Canvas Release Schedule will be adjusted to support two-week deploys and monthly releases every third Saturday of the month.
Background
Existing three-week releases include code deploys for predetermined features, fixed bugs, backend changes, performance updates, API modifications, platform upgrades, and other code adjustments completed by Canvas engineering teams. However, releases and deploys should not be synonymous terms. More and more software companies are moving to cloud-based continuous deployments because of both the engineering and customer benefits.
Upcoming Change
Beginning July 15, Canvas teams will make adjustments to the Canvas release schedule focusing on two key objectives: make new feature releases more predictable and improve the quality of Canvas code. Releases and deploys will be separate events. A deploy means making code available in a specific environment; code may or may not be visible. A release represents a scheduled event when code is intended to be visible.
- Releases contain changes that affect user workflows for any Canvas-related product.
- Deploys contain non-customer-affecting code changes intended to fix bugs, improve performance, and prepare for new features.
Releases and deploys will take place on the following timelines:
- Feature releases will take place on the third Saturday of every month, beginning August 17
- Deploys of the main Canvas codebase will take place every other Wednesday, beginning July 31.
As a result, Rutgers Canvas will post information concerning the Feature Releases as has occurred in the past. Depending on the nature of the deploys, an update may not be posted since the code will not affect user workflow.