About Nitro Releases

Veeva Nitro updates and releases software on a regular basis to improve the usability and performance of the product. This document serves to help you understand the different upgrades, timing, who gets upgraded when, and communication about upgrades and releases.

The following are definitions of the various releases:

  • Major Release - Includes major new features, all product enhancements, bug fixes, and release notes. This release goes to all Nitro clusters.
  • Minor Release - Includes minor new features, product enhancements, bug fixes, and release notes. This release goes to all Nitro clusters.
  • Metadata Release - Includes new features and bug fixes just for metadata, for example, new analytic star schema, extensions of existing tables, and fixes for Nitro ETL jobs.
  • Hotfix – An unplanned release containing a typically small number of fixes or issues.
  • System Maintenance - Scheduled downtime for system infrastructure changes like server restarts. Veeva Nitro does not have a regular schedule for system maintenance.

Release Details

 

Frequency

Communication

Communication Recipients

Documentation

Major Release

Every 4 months on a Thursday

2023 Release Dates

Published the day of the release All customers Major Release Notes

Minor Release

Every 4 weeks on a Thursday

2023 Release Dates

Published the day of the release All customers Minor Release Notes

Maintenance Release

Every 2 weeks on a Thursday

Published the day of the release

All customers

Maintenance Release Notes

Hotfix

Not Scheduled

24 hours in advance

All customers

Patch Release Note

System Maintenance

Not scheduled

Up to 1 week in advance

All customers on affected PODs

No

The frequency or day may change due to holidays.

For urgent or critical releases, we may release with less than 24 hours notice.

Documentation

General Release notes are delivered the same day as the production upgrade associated with a Major Release. Release notes include new feature information and all user-visible changes.

Minor Release notes are delivered the same day as the production upgrade associated with a Minor Release. Release notes include new feature information and all user-visible changes.

Metadata Release notes are delivered the same day as the production upgrade associated with a Metadata release. Release notes include all bug fixes since the last Metadata release and limited new features or enhancements.

Release Communication

Release communications are sent from the Veeva Trust site

To sign up for release communication via Veeva Trust:

  1. Navigate to trust.veeva.com.
  2. Select the Subscribe to the Veeva Trust Site tab.

The Trust pages are updated to indicate when a release is finished.

Cluster Locations

Clusters are the servers where the application is hosted. Clusters are located in data centers in Germany, Japan, and on the east coast of the US. 

Veeva Nitro Cluster

Location

North America

US – Ohio

Europe

EU - Frankfurt

Asia Pacific APAC - Tokyo

AWS Maintenance

Veeva is hosted on a combination of Veeva-managed servers running on AWS. For more information, see AWS Global Infrastructure.

AWS Maintenance for Nitro clusters occurs weekly on Saturday. Please refer the scheduler in the NAC for the time. AWS requires at least a 30-minute window in the instance's weekly schedule to confirm all instances have the latest patches and upgrades. During the maintenance window, tasks are performed on clusters and instances. To protect the security and stability of your data, maintenance can cause instances to be unavailable.

Nitro Upgrades

Online users can view their orgs as read-only during an upgrade. Offline Nitro users are not affected during upgrades, but can not sync while an upgrade is in progress. Offline users are prompted to upgrade at the conclusion of their sync session. If the user decides to skip the install process, an Update Now button displays.