Fleet Beta Risks

[hilt86]

Can someone from Elastic tell us what the risks of running Fleet are? when you run Fleet it says :

Fleet is under active development and is not intended for use in production environments. This beta release is designed for users to test and offer feedback about Fleet and the new Elastic Agent. This plugin is not subject to the support SLA.

Yet at the same time we're encouraged in the UI to run it. What are the risks of running Fleet with specific regard to a production environment? This message hasn't changed in almost a year...

[BenB196]

I believe from looking at some of the GitHub issues that 7.13 will bring a major breaking change (standalone fleet server rather than using Kibana as a Fleet server). From what I can tell, there is no migration path for this breaking change (all agents will need to be redeployed), so I'd recommend at least waiting until 7.13 is out. But even then, as long as stuff is in beta, no chance that it won't cause issues. Here is one of the issues that talks about this change: [Fleet] Add migration messaging to Fleet Server onboarding · Issue #97139 · elastic/kibana · GitHub.

I too am waiting for fleet to hopefully become GA soon as it seems like a promising solution for managing large scale deployments and configurations of beats + new security stuff.

[ruflin]

Hi, as @BenB196 mentioned, there will be a breaking change in 7.13 as we switch over to fleet-server for enrolling the Elastic Agents. I can't give you an exact timeline but we are working hard on pushing this to GA.