JDK 17 upgrade plan

[nagyesta]

Dear Lowkey Vault Users,

first of all, thank you for using Lowkey Vault, it is great to know that the project has a place in so many of your build pipelines! I wanted to share some of my plans about the upcoming JDK 17 upgrade I will need to perform (in #373). I thought it is better to start a conversation about it in time, in order to keep things working and cause the minimum amount of disruption to your work.

As you might know, JDK 11, the version currently used by Lowkey Vault will reach end of life on 30 September 2023. Due to this, I intend to upgrade to JDK 17 and the latest Spring Boot, Tomcat, etc. dependency versions somewhere around August-September 2023. By that time, I expect the certificate features to be completed, so even in case you are running the Jar artifacts of Lowkey Vault using JDK 11, and for some reason, you are not able to switch to JDK 17, you can continue to use the final JDK 11 version of the Lowkey Vault, at your own risk, as long as you don't mind not getting new updates. At the same time, any feature developed after #373 will not be ported back to the JDK 11 version (there will be only one maintained version at any time, and it will be using JDK 17).

How should you handle this situation?

1. If you are switching to JDK 17 in your app anyways

   Please keep using the latest Lowkey Vault version at all times (as recommended already) so that you can get the latest supported versions of the artifacts and the transitive dependencies coming with it. The current, JDK 11 version of the artifacts is already expected to work with JDK 17 as well, if it does not, please feel free to raise a bug here

2. If you are not able to switch to JDK 17 in your app

   Please let me know by sending a reply here, I don't want to intentionally cause issues to you, but I don't want to do a whole lot of work if it is not causing issues to anyone either.

Thank you in advance!

[nagyesta]

Update: implementation of this major upgrade is next in queue, no more planned releases between 1.30.0 and 2.0.0

[nagyesta]

Hi,

the first step of the update is released with 2.0.0. It is supposed to work as follows:

• The Lowkey Vault app is built with the latest dependencies using JDK 17
• The Docker containers (both the Alpine and the multiarch Jammy variants) are using JDK 17 base images
• The Lowkey Vault Client and Lowkey Vault Testcontainters dependencies are built using JDK 11 in order to ensure that you can continue using them even in case you cannot upgrade your application to JDK 17.
• The Docker container tests keep using JDK 11 in order to test with the same version as the client libs and hopefully cause no surprises or hidden bugs.

How long will we support JDK 11 in the Client and Testcontainers modules?

I would like to be as supportive as possible in this regard, because I know that not every project is able to upgrade to the latest JDK versions. Due to this, I will set a reasonable (as in giving you a lot of time) but ambitious (as in probably regretting this later when the issues happen) goal to keep supporting JDK 11 in these components for 2 years (until 2025-08-19) before upgrading them to a newer version. Of course, this can be made impossible if either of the dependencies (Azure SDK or Testcontainers) drop their JDK 11 support earlier, in which case I will need to re-evaluate this deadline and provide an update here.

I hope this plan can work for everyone, but please let me know in case it is problematic for you!

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Enjoy using the new versions and please make sure to raise a bug here if they do not behave as mentioned above!

Thank you!