Upgrade base OS from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04

This article describes the upgrade path and expectations for IDAs moving from ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. We will be skipping over 18.04.

External Links

• 18.04 LTS Release Notes

• 20.04 LTS Release Notes

Instructions

1. Upgrading your testing environment

   1. Sandboxes

      1. Update the base AMI on your sandbox build to Ubuntu_20.04
         
         

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      2. Run the sandbox build for your application, fix bugs, repeat.

2. Travis CI or CircleCI

   1. This might require you to update the devstack docker container your app runs in. If your app runs travis integration tests in a docker container pulled from the edxops org, you may have to do step 5 (below) first.

   2. Update the dist: field in your .travis.yml file to focal

3. Identifying dependency changes

   1. Ansible system packages

      1. Look at the package list passed into the edx_django_service_debian_pkgs_extra parameter for your ansible role. This will be in the meta/main.yaml file, and will probably reference a variable set in defaults/main.yaml

      2. Look at tasks/main.yaml and look for calls to apt.

      3. Look up the differences between an 16.04 sandbox vs. a 20.04 sandbox (created above) by running dpkg -l | grep packagename on each machine type.

      4. on the 20.04 server, run apt-get changelog packagename to see the changelog. read through the changelog to determine if any changes need to be accounted for in your use of that dependency. Ask SRE if you need specific advice.

4. Upgrading Devstack

   1. Find your app in https://github.com/edx/configuration/tree/master/docker/build

   2. change the line From edxops/xenial-common to From edxops/focal-common in the Dockerfile

   3. run the jenkins job that rebuilds the base image. (https://tools-edx-jenkins.edx.org/job/DockerCI/job/image-builders/)

5. Upgrading your deployment (this may be a separate ticket)

   1. Make sure all Jenkins jobs that hit this service support the correct version of python and Ubuntu

   2. GoCD Base AMI

      1. Find your IDA’s staging environment config in https://github.com/edx/gomatic-internal/tree/master/gocd/vars/tools/environment-deployment-play

      2. Change the value for base_ami_ubuntu_version to 20.04

      3. Your pipelines should reseed after your changes are merged, if you have issues ask SRE to reseed your pipelines manually.

 Significant Changes since 16.04

• Python 2 is no longer in the base image. It will be installed by the ansible bootstrap method, but it may not be identical to what you had on 16.04.

• NTPd is no longer used, and instead timesyncd is used.

Timeline

https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/DOS-1619 - needs to be done by 11/9

• 16.04 becomes end of life in April, 2021.

• Open edX Juniper will ship based on 16.04, but Open edX Koa will ship based on 20.04.

• Application Owners should plan to upgrade to 20.04 as part of the Koa release (targeted for December 9, 2020, upgrades must be in place by Nov 9).

Out of Scope

• https://github.com/edx/taxonomy-connector -  it is currently an IDA, but the goal is to turn it into a plugin for edx-platform, so we don't believe any work is needed.

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