Engine Yard’s Plans for Ruby 1.8.6

Back in May of 2009, Engine Yard’s Kirk Haines took over legacy maintenance duties for Ruby 1.8.6. Since then, the core Ruby team led by Kirk has released patches, security updates, and performance tweaks for Ruby 1.8.6 benefiting Engine Yard’s customers who wished to remain on Ruby 1.8.6. However, as is often the case, all good things must come to an end.

At RubyKaigi this year, Kirk announced that he along with the rest of the core Ruby team would no longer be supporting Ruby 1.8.6. This means that customers using Ruby 1.8.6 will no longer benefit from the latest security patches and performance improvements being developed. While your applications will continue to operate, we believe our customers would benefit most from using the latest technology components.

No immediate action is currently required but now would be a good time to start evaluating a migration to 1.8.7 or 1.9.2 for everyone currently running 1.8.6. Engine Yard will be contacting customers who currently have environments running 1.8.6 in order to discuss options and timelines. At a high level, the three different options for customers are:

• Perform the migration yourself by following these high level steps
• Contact Engine Yard Professional Services in order to have the migration performed on your behalf.
• Take no action, acknowledging that no new MRI patches or updates will be available to your environment.

When considering your migration strategy, it will also be important to keep in mind that Ruby 1.8.7 will be downgraded to support-only maintenance in the summer of 2012 and will reach end-of-life during the following summer in 2013. We recently set Ruby 1.9.2 as our default run-time and strongly recommend you consider it for your migration.