On June 30, 2020 the Debian project will stop providing security patch support for the Debian 8 "Jessie" release. The Cloud Services and SRE teams at the Wikimedia Foundation would like to have all usage of Debian Jessie in our managed networks replaced with newer versions of Debian's operating system on or ideally well before that date.

A page has been created on Wikitech [0] with an initial timeline for the removal of all Debian Jessie instances from Cloud VPS projects. This timeline follows roughly the same schedule as we used in 2018 when deprecating Ubuntu Trusty in Cloud VPS projects:

* September 2019: Announce the initiative via this email and the Wikitech page * October 2019: Start actively contacting instance maintainers who need to migrate to a new OS * November & December 2019: Continue to work with instance maintainers to migrate to a new OS * January 2020: Shutdown remaining Debian Jessie instances

If you know that your Cloud VPS project is using Debian Jessie, you can get a head start on migrating your instances to Debian Buster (preferred) or Stretch by visiting the Wikitech page and reading the instructions there.

If you are a concerned Toolforge user, stay tuned for future announcements about changes that will be made as the Toolforge admin team works to remove Debian Jessie from that environment. For now there is nothing an individual Tool maintainer needs to do.

[0]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Jessie_deprecation

Bryan - on behalf of the Cloud VPS admin team