Xenial stemcells now available: migration plan
Hi everyone.
My name is Frédéric. I joined the BOSH team as a product manager recently, and work from Pivotal's Toronto office. Nice to meet you all!
A few weeks ago, the BOSH team introduced a new stemcell line based on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) on bosh.io. For the time being, this line will be maintained in parallel with the previous ones, based on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr).
Canonical will provide security updates for Trusty until April 2019 per their official support lifecycle policy. Because Canonical will no longer provide security updates for Trusty after April 2019, we strongly recommend users start migrating towards the Xenial-based stemcell line now.
The BOSH team will continue to support the current 3586.x line of Trusty-based stemcells with upstream security patches until the CFAR migration to Xenial is complete. We do not plan on releasing any new major versions of Trusty-based stemcells, unless consumers have a specific request for a new major, and instead will focus on Xenial going forward.
We are currently evaluating when we will retire the Trusty-based stemcells, and are looking for feedback from the community about technical blockers that could impede the adoption of Xenial stemcells. If you are a release author, please take the time to verify your software on Xenial-based stemcells at the earliest opportunity. As a reminder, operators using cf-deployment must keep in mind that the repository will switch to Xenial-based stemcells well before April 2019 and should plan accordingly (more details on this can be found here).