What are Salesforce releases?
Salesforce delivers hundreds of innovative features to all customers three times a year during seasonal releases: Spring, Summer, and Winter. It provides customers with seamless, automatic upgrades each release, delivered in real time, with minimal downtime.
Each Salesforce release unfolds in a predictable cycle, starting about 3 months before it goes live in production. Upgrades happen automatically on specific dates that are published up to a year in advance on the Salesforce Trust website.
The first set of upgrades happens on sandbox instances 4-6 weeks before a release goes into production. To be ready for future releases, review the maintenance schedule. Then find both the sandbox release dates and production release dates for your instance. Mark your calendar with these dates and plan backward from them.