Hi cf-dev,

This is a very exciting email to write! I'm extremely proud to announce
that BOSH Windows, the new deployment mechanism for Windows cells, is now
generally available!

ACTION REQUIRED: Given that BOSH Windows is now ready to use and fully
compatible with Diego, we intend to end-of-life the Diego MSI immediately.
More details on this and an explanation for the accelerated timescale are
at the bottom of this email.

About BOSH Windows: At this point BOSH Windows has been successfully
running 100% of the CI/CD workload for the BOSH Windows and Greenhouse
teams for more than a month. The Diego team has also just finished an
effort to integrate workers deployed via BOSH Windows in their CI/CD
pipeline. In all cases it has held up remarkably well. Given this I'm
happy to recommend people move over to BOSH Windows as soon as possible
(the cf-deployment "windows-cell" ops file
<https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-deployment/blob/master/operations/windows-cell.yml>
should make this extremely simple -- but please note you MUST evacuate
any cells that were deployed using the MSI as part of the transition or you
WILL have problems in the future).

As well as being based on open standards, BOSH Windows has some other
significant benefits:



-

We've been able to simplify and modularise the BOSH code base as part
of this transition. This enables feature parity with BOSH-deployed Linux VMs
-

BOSH Windows uses the exact same agent code as BOSH Linux for running
jobs, so when you run jobs you know they run similarly on Windows as
elsewhere


I'm immensely proud of the teams that have worked together to deliver this.

DIEGO MSI END OF LIFE: 19/5/2017 - ACTION REQUIRED: Now that BOSH Windows
is ready we’re extremely keen to avoid maintaining two deployment methods
for any longer than necessary, so we would like to move everyone to BOSH
Windows immediately. Doing this on an accelerated timescale is particularly
important because Diego intends to remove the global route-emitter in the
near future. Due to the release of BOSH Windows, we have not implemented
the local route-emitter for MSI cells, which would prevent apps on MSI
cells from being routed to once the global route-emitter is removed.

If anyone has huge problems moving off MSI cells now please reach out to
me asap and we’ll see what we can do. Either way, we will no longer be
supporting MSI cells or accepting pull requests from this point. Unless
anyone has a strong reason otherwise (if so please do say!), we will end
support for MSI cells on 19/5/2017.

Thanks all very much, and again a huge thanks to the BOSH Windows team!