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# Policies

This page contains a list of major policies agreed upon by the Apache Beam community.

## Releases

Apache Beam makes minor releases every 6 weeks, therefore 8 releases in a 12 month period. Apache Beam has a [calendar](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=0p73sl034k80oob7seouanigd0%40group.calendar.google.com) for cutting the next release branch. After a release branch is cut, the community works quickly to finalize that release.  We encourage you to update early and often; do not wait until the deprecation date of the version you are using.

It is up to the Apache Beam community to decide whether an identified issue is a major issue that warrants a patch release. Some examples of major issues are high severity security issues and high risk data integrity issues.


If you wish to report a security vulnerability, please contact [security@apache.org](mailto:security@apache.org). Apache Beam follows the typical [Apache vulnerability handling process](https://apache.org/security/committers.html#vulnerability-handling).
