What Does Private Preview, Public Preview, and GA Mean?

Substance in meaning

I hear from customers quite a bit that wonder exactly what it means when a feature, service, or product is in a specific stage of development. Many organizations have policies against deploying anything that’s not production ready, yet many of those organizations miss out on current functionality because the stages aren’t clearly defined. A lot of organizations treat Public Preview like it is still a beta product when the only thing really missing is the SLA.

Here’s the best way to think about them:

• Private Preview is feature complete, not publicly announced, not recommended for production use, no SLA. ​​

• Public Preview is feature complete, recommended for production use, may not be available to all the customers in a region, excluded from SLA. ​​

• GA (Generally Available) is available to all customers in a region, starting to rollout to multiple regions, backed by SLA.

---

[Want to discuss this further? Hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn]

[Subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog]

[Subscribe to the Weekly Microsoft Sentinel Newsletter]

[Subscribe to the Weekly Microsoft Defender Newsletter]

[Learn KQL with the Must Learn KQL series and book]