Camel 4.14 died nine days early —
and the pages that would tell you are gone.
Apache Camel 4.14 reached end of life on August 11, 2026. If you had a different date written down — most likely August 20 — you are not misremembering: that date was published across the lifecycle-tracking ecosystem until last week, derived from the reasonable assumption that an LTS released on August 15, 2025 gets a full year. It did not. It got 361 days, because Camel ends an LTS when the next LTS ships, and 4.22 shipped on August 11.
Nine days is a small correction with a non-small property: anyone who diarised the published date spent last week believing they had patch coverage they did not have. And verifying the correction is unusually hard right now, because the vendor pages that would confirm it have vanished.
What actually happened to 4.14
Camel 4.14 was the August 2025 LTS. Its published end-of-life date had long been listed as August 20, 2026 — release date plus a year, the standard reading of Camel’s LTS promise. But Camel’s operating practice is subtly different: an LTS line is maintained until the next LTS arrives. The 4.22.0 release landed on August 11, 2026 — a few days ahead of 4.14’s anniversary — and with it, 4.14’s window closed. The lifecycle data ecosystem corrected the date the same day, with the 4.22 release recorded as the trigger.
Its final patch was 4.14.9, released August 9, 2026 — two days before the end. There will not be another.
The vanishing paper trail
Here is the part that turns a routine date correction into a story about how lifecycle facts survive. As of publication:
Camel’s support page at camel.apache.org/manual/support.html returns 404. The 2020 blog post that defined the LTS schedule — the canonical statement of the one-year policy — is no longer online; the lifecycle-data community now cites it via the Internet Archive. Even the 4.22 what’s-new announcement cited in the correction currently 404s. The release archive that remains lists versions and dates — and no end-of-support information at all.
None of this is unusual, and that is the point. Projects restructure their websites; old blog posts fall off; policy pages move without redirects. The software keeps its lifecycle — but the record of that lifecycle degrades, and the moment it degrades is exactly the moment a date changes and you need to check it. This is why we verify against primary sources and say which ones, and why “the vendor’s page” is not an archival strategy for compliance evidence: screenshot or archive the policy your audit depends on, the day you depend on it.
The Camel clock: 361 days if you’re lucky, 5 if you’re not
Camel ships roughly two LTS releases a year, each supported until its successor LTS arrives — about a year in practice. Everything else is a non-LTS release, supported only until the next release of any kind. Measured across the recent 4.x line:
| Version | Type | Released | End of life | Lifespan | Risk score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.21 | non-LTS | 2026-06-26 | 2026-08-11 | 46 days | 35 |
| 4.20 | non-LTS | 2026-04-23 | 2026-06-26 | 64 days | 35 |
| 4.19 | non-LTS | 2026-04-18 | 2026-04-23 | 5 days | 40 |
| 4.17 | non-LTS | 2026-01-12 | 2026-02-17 | 36 days | 40 |
| 4.14 | LTS | 2025-08-15 | 2026-08-11 | 361 days | 35 |
Camel 4.19 was supported for five days. That is not a typo; 4.20 followed it inside a week. Running non-LTS Camel in production means accepting that your version can leave support before your change-management process finishes approving it. The LTS releases are the only ones with a plannable window — and as 4.14 just demonstrated, even that window is “until the next LTS”, not a calendar promise.
What is supported today
Two release lines, and that is the complete list:
| Version | Type | Supported until | Latest patch | Risk score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4.22 | LTS (current) | 2027-08-11 | 4.22.0 | 10 |
| 4.18 | LTS | 2027-02-17 | 4.18.4 | 10 |
Everything else in the 4.x line is past end of life, along with all of Camel 3 and 2. Note the asymmetry for upgraders: 4.18 has six months left; 4.22 has a year. If you are moving off 4.14 anyway, 4.22 is the only destination that does not schedule a second move within months.
What to do
If you are on 4.14: upgrade to 4.22. Within the LTS-to-LTS path the migration burden is deliberately kept low, and 4.22’s window runs to August 2027. You have been unpatched since August 11 — treat this as this sprint’s work, not this quarter’s.
If you are on a non-LTS 4.x: you were out of support within weeks of deploying, whether you noticed or not. Move to 4.22 and adopt an LTS-only policy for Camel — the 5-to-68-day table above is the whole argument.
If you diarised August 20: update the diary, and note the deeper lesson: the date moved because a release event happened, not because an announcement was made. Deadline tracking that only reads announcements misses corrections like this one — ours re-verifies every date against upstream data at every build, which is how we caught it.
Every Camel release line, its dates and its EOL Risk Score are on the Apache Camel lifecycle page, updated at every build from upstream data.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Apache Camel 4.14 reach end of life?
August 11, 2026 — the day Camel 4.22, the next LTS, was released. Camel ends an LTS line when its successor LTS ships, so 4.22 arriving ahead of 4.14's first anniversary closed the window nine days before the August 20 date many trackers had published from the one-year assumption.
Which Apache Camel versions are still supported?
As of mid-August 2026, two: Camel 4.22 (LTS, supported to August 11, 2027) and Camel 4.18 (LTS, supported to February 17, 2027). Every other Camel release line — including every non-LTS 4.x — is past end of life.
How long are Apache Camel releases supported?
LTS releases (roughly two per year) are supported for about a year — in practice until the next LTS ships, which is how 4.14 got 361 days. Non-LTS releases are supported only until the next release of any kind: the recent ones lived between 5 and 68 days. Camel's own LTS policy post is no longer online; the policy survives via the Internet Archive.
Where does the August 11 date come from if Camel's pages are offline?
From the release event itself: Camel 4.22.0 shipped on August 11, 2026, and Camel's practice is that an LTS ends when its successor LTS ships. The correction is recorded in the endoflife.date change history with the 4.22 release as the trigger, and the underlying LTS policy is preserved in the Internet Archive. We link primary sources because Camel's support page and the 4.22 announcement URL currently return 404.