Hi,

On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 6:49 PM Tim Moody tim@timmoody.com wrote:

Is https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Operating_system_upgrade_policy accurate?

That page describes the target timeline that would be followed in an ideal world with unlimited engineering resources. Sometimes timelines slip, for example right now there's 225 hosts running Debian Buster in the Wikimedia "production" environment and another ~200 within Cloud VPS even though Buster was according to that policy supposed to be gone sometime last year.

Currently we tend to drop support for a release from Cloud VPS once the other Wikimedia environments are far enough in the migration that we start blocking support removal from shared infrastructure, or once the Debian LTS project drops support for a specific release. The latter is happening for Buster soon so we recently announced removal of Buster support from Cloud VPS (see below).

I shows support ending as follows:

Buster: September 2023 Bullseye: September 2025

I have the impression that VPS support for Buster is ending in May or June of this year.

The plan for Cloud VPS is documented at https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Buster_deprecation: "Support for Debian Buster ends on June 30th, 2024."

Also, if I look at an instance's OS in Horizon I see

debian-12.0-bookworm (deprecated 2024-04-10)

I'm not clear why this would be deprecated already.

This is the specific version of the Debian Bookworm base image that your instance was created with, it means that on 2024-04-10 a new image was built to replace that one. That is unrelated to the process for dropping support for an entire OS release.

Taavi