Palantir's approach to software development and product design strives to achieve a balance between moving quickly and providing a stable foundation our customers can rely upon. We incorporate cutting-edge technologies and frameworks while remaining grounded in the real-world problems our customers are facing day to day.
In practice, this means that Palantir can develop new capabilities in close partnership with customers. This page outlines the progression of features in the Foundry platform, from initial prototyping and development through general availability.
New features in Foundry begin in an experimental or prototype phase.
These are early-stage features that Palantir engineers typically develop in collaboration with a small set of customers—typically no more than three. The goal of experimental features is to demonstrate and validate a new capability as quickly as possible. We prioritize speed of development over long-term maintainability, which allows us to explore the space of solutions expansively. Products in this phase of development are expected to change frequently and dramatically and will often be completely scrapped.
Features in the experimental phase are generally not publicly documented, and may not progress to the Beta or General Availability phases. This is by design—providing a way to experiment with new features in an open-ended way has led to some of Palantir's most significant advancements over the years, and practically every part of Foundry went through this phase at some point in its history.
Once a feature's value and approach has been validated with one or more customer partners, it is made available to a broader group of customers in a Beta phase.
The goal of a Beta feature is to invest heavily in the long-term maintainability of the product. For this reason, we roll these features out to customers slowly in order to gather ample feedback during the development process. Partners in the Beta phase are chosen based on whether their needs align with the capabilities that have been developed so far, and whether the feedback they will provide aligns with the areas of greatest product uncertainty.
Beta features may be documented publicly to help enable customer partners to use this early-stage functionality, but are unavailable in many Foundry environments. When a feature is in the Beta phase, it will be labeled as such in documentation.
There is no guarantee that Beta features will progress to become Generally Available, but the vast majority do—most product uncertainty gets resolved during the experimental phase.
General Availability is the term used to describe the vast majority of features in Foundry. GA features are enabled for customers by default and constitute a core part of the platform. When features become GA, other parts of the platform may build on top of them to enable tight-knit integrations across the platform.
In the GA phase, there is a continuous feedback loop between Palantir engineers and the broad set of customers using the feature. Feedback is triaged, prioritized, and fed into Foundry's product roadmap, and updates are delivered to customers rapidly using Apollo ↗, Palantir's platform for continuous delivery.
Although GA features are widely available, it is possible in some cases that your environment may not have every feature enabled. This is because some features have dependencies on specific types of infrastructure, or may require specific contractual agreements to enable. For example, some GA features in Foundry are only available in Palantir's managed SaaS environment and are not supported for self-hosted installations.
Note that when a new feature or application is announced as generally available, there may be a delay of a week or more before it becomes available within a specific Foundry enrollment. For additional details on the specific timing of availability for a feature or application, contact your Palantir representative.
Unless otherwise specified, any publicly documented feature is Generally Available. You can rely on GA features to be fully supported into the future. The removal of any GA feature from the platform will follow the deprecation process outlined below.
As development progresses, there are times when an existing feature or application in Foundry reaches the end of its usefulness or purpose or is superseded by another functionality. The original vision for the feature may be narrower than the problem space it has grown to address, or new tools or features may enable approaches to the problem which are more robust or scalable.
When a previously GA feature reaches this phase, it may progress through a sunset period, before being formally deprecated. Deprecated functionality is called out as such within the platform and in documentation. Where there are existing workflows that depend on deprecated functionality, the integrated Upgrade Assistant is used to notify administrators of the change and provide a clear deadline for complying with the deprecation. In addition for application-level deprecations, the intent to deprecate and the final deprecation notice are proactively shared with the registered platform administrators contact details as well as publicly on the Foundry Announcements page. Progress towards feature deprecation is tracked quantitatively to ensure all customers are able to migrate to a replacement before a feature is finally removed from the platform.
Palantir's approach to product development has been crafted to enable rapid feature development and close collaboration with customers, while ensuring that our customers can rely on features in the Foundry platform as the core building blocks for the organization's data infrastructure, analytics, and day-to-day operations.