News/2025 Cloud VPS Bullseye deprecation
This page keeps track of our ongoing effort to retire Debian 11 Bullseye from Cloud VPS.
Tell me exactly what I need to do
Cloud VPS project maintainers
- Check toolforge:os-deprecation for reports about your project(s)
- For each reported deprecated instance:
- Create a new instance using Debian Trixie (longest time until future deprecation) or Debian Bookworm
- Move content and configuration from the old Bullseye instance to the new instance
- If you are using a web proxy on the old instance, update the proxy to point at the new instance
- Shutdown the old Bullseye instance
- Update any maintainer documentation to reference the new instance rather than the old Bullseye instance
- When you are sure you have all the content and configuration moved, delete the old Bullseye instance
If you need additional quota to create new virtual machine instances, follow the instructions on Phabricator to request a temporary quota increase.
Toolforge tool maintainers
No action is needed for Toolforge users at this point. Retirement of Bullseye-based prebuilt images will be announced separately.
Timeline
TBD
Frequently asked questions
Can I upgrade an existing VM in-place, instead of re-creating it with a newer Debian release?
We are using the OS upgrades as an opportunity to roll out new defaults (e.g. more modern network options), which does not work if instances are upgraded in-place instead of created from scratch. The migration tracking tooling also relies on the image that an instance was created with to detect if it needs upgrading or not and your instance might be wrongly flagged for deletion. If you have specific reasons why you can not re-create the instance, please contact us.
See also
Communication and support
Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation Cloud Services team and Wikimedia movement volunteers. Please reach out with questions and join the conversation:
- Chat in real time in the IRC channel #wikimedia-cloud connect or the bridged Telegram group
- Discuss via email after you have subscribed to the cloud@ mailing list
- Subscribe to the cloud-announce@ mailing list (all messages are also mirrored to the cloud@ list)
- Read the News wiki page
Use a subproject of the #Cloud-Services Phabricator project to track confirmed bug reports and feature requests about the Cloud Services infrastructure itself
Read the Cloud Services Blog (for the broader Wikimedia movement, see the Wikimedia Technical Blog)