Comment by justin_oaks
5 hours ago
My upgrade policy for everything:
Significant security vulnerability? Upgrade
Feature you need? Upgrade
All other reasons: Don't upgrade.
Upgrading takes effort and it is risky. The benefits must be worth the risks.
Once your version doesn’t receive security fixes you’re one CERT advisory away from having your whole week pre-empted by an emergency upgrade.
I’ve been there with products that were still internal at the time. I can only imagine how much fun that is with a public product. But then I do have a pretty vivid imagination. We changed to periodic upgrades after that to avoid the obvious problem staring us in the face.
Suggestion: add "End of life (no more maintenance for this version)? Upgrade"
Why? If the implemented featureset meets your needs, and there are no unresolved bugs or security vulnerabilities relevant to your use cases, what further "maintenance" do you need?
When a critical security patch comes out, you don't want to have to to do a major version upgrade to get it.
Because when the maintainers have stopped patching that version against all known security vulnerabilities, that doesn't stop the bad guys from looking for more vulnerabilities. When they find one, it will get exploited. So you either wake up to an email from Have I Been Pwned to say all your customer data has been exfiltrated [0], or (if you're lucky) you have a mad scramble to do that update before they get you.
[0] Probably including those passwords you didn't hash, and those credit card numbers you shouldn't be storing in the first place because, what the heck, it meets your needs.
Eventually you get forced to update it when the other stuff you use starts having minimum version requirements.
Here’s another reason to upgrade: your version is end of life and your cloud provider forced it.
Thank you Amazon!