Elastic Agent release process

Stack

Elastic Agent follows a release process aligned with the broader Elastic Stack release schedule. The latest features, enhancements, and fixes are documented in the release notes.

Independent Elastic Agent releases deliver critical fixes and updates for Elastic Agent and Elastic Defend, independently of the full stack release. This is a more conservative process than a typical patch release, and only modifies the specific Elastic Agent components needed for a targeted fix. For example, an independent Elastic Agent hotfix release for Elastic Defend would only change the endpoint-security executable, with the remaining executables being exactly those released in the previous patch.

In independent Elastic Agent releases, a build identifier is appended to the semantic version of the base release in the format +build{yyyymmddhhmm}, where {yyyymmddhhmm} is the release timestamp of the build.