Best Practices: Guidelines for provider version maintenance

[automagic]

Problem description

From a customer request:

Hello team, up until quite recently we were using v6.61.0 as our sdk version for the pulumi gcp which was released in Jul 2023. We have not upgraded to a v8 version due to a couple of requests that were not supported by the older SDK. This is the case on AWS and Azure too. Is there a guidance from Pulumi as to how often we should be upgrading major versions of the SDK? Also, at some point do you deprecate the older version of the SDK because of lack of support? Any such guidance will be helpful for us to plan ahead with the operational aspect of upgrading the SDKs and potentially not running into issues that have solutions on the newer version of the releases. Thanks!

Provide prescriptive guidance on how customers should approach provider version maintenance, how to approach major vs. minor updates, what timeframes they should consider, and any other aspects surrounding provider version maintenance.

Affected product version(s)

Pulumi Providers

Suggestions for a fix

Example guidance:

• When a major version is released, that is a signal to begin planning a provider version update
• At least quarterly, consider updating minor version on the current major, and minimally review provider change logs
• Always allow patch updates on the current minor, for example, using the tilde operator in npm: ~1.2.3
• Never be 2 major versions behind, as it is inadvisable to jump a major version due to the number of potential breaking changes across the major versions