This about why we rollout to SN different patch versions on each minor version.
Let me give some context about SN rollout.
SN rollouts take time because we release them in ~24 hours steps that make the new version applicable to an increasing % of storage nodes. Currently, the steps are: 5%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 80%, 100%. Weekends and official company holidays are excluded from this cadence, which means that we don’t promise to follow the next % rollout during those days, although we sometimes do; when some rollout isn’t finished and runs on any of those days, the rollout continues the following business day.
The storage nodes which follow the cursor are the ones that use the storage node updater which, currently, are the ones installed through or Windows and Linux installer.
The ones using the Docker images and Watchtower are updated when we publish the new Docker images and Watchtower executes the check. The Docker images are just published right after we deploy the 100% step.
But, why do we only roll out some versions?
Because sometimes we need/want to release some Satellite updates and avoid selecting all the SN changes that we want to release for the next release and other times, there aren’t any new changes for the storage node so we wait until we have them to create a new release.
Considering that some Satellite updates are released in a pretty short period of time, just hours if we start a new SN release roll out on each version, we would end up that SN release may never catch up with the last version due to our ~24 hours percentage release commented above.
I hope that this comment clarifies, why SN releases aren’t consecutive.