subj: Eliminating Debian Stretch in Cloud VPS

Debian Stretch's security support ends in mid 2022, and the Foundation's 
OS policy already discourages use of existing Stretch machines. That 
means that it's time for all project admins to start rebuilding your VMs 
with Bullseye (or, if you must, Buster.)

Any webservices running in Kubernetes created in the last year or two 
are most likely using Buster images already, so there's no action needed 
for those. Older kubernetes jobs should be refreshed to use more modern 
images whenever possible.

If you are still using the grid engine for webservices, we strongly 
encourage you to migrate your jobs to Kubernetes. For other grid uses, 
watch this space for future announcements about grid engine migration; 
we don't yet have a solution prepared for that.


Details about the what and why for this process can be found here:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Stretch_deprecation


Here is the deprecation timeline:


March 2021: Stretch VM creation disabled in most projects

July 6, 2021: Active support of Stretch ends, Stretch moves into LTS

<- You are Here ->

January 1st, 2022: Stretch VM creation disabled in all projects, 
deprecation nagging begins in earnest. Stretch alternatives will be 
available for tool migration in Toolforge

May 1, 2022: All active Stretch VMs will be shut down (but not deleted) 
by WMCS admins. This includes Toolforge grid exec nodes.

June 30, 2022: LTS support for Debian Stretch ends, all Stretch VMs will 
be deleted by WMCS admins