PHP 7.4 End of life

Question

We have an application running on PHP 7.4 in a Linux VM on Azure. We are currently working on rewriting it and hope to deliver the rewrite in January (sans PHP and Linux). We are evaluating the end of life notification we got and are trying to figure out if we are OK to leave our application on 7.4 because it is currently hosted on a Linux VM, and how this affects SLA's we have on that VM. Can anyone clarify?

Answer 1

@Josh Donner To add to what Dillon kindly shared, we will still continue to provide the 7.4 image on App Services. This update is mainly saying that we will not be providing any further updates or patches to the particular branch and that you will need to eventually migrate over to a supported branch to remain secure and receive bug fixes.

There should not be any issue with waiting a few weeks to upgrade your application. If you wanted to wait 1-3 years to upgrade, that would be a different discussion, but we still offer the older stacks for some time. This is confirmed here, where we state, "Extended support for PHP 7.4 will end on November 28, 2022. After this date, your applications will continue to run, however any application hosted in App Service targeting PHP 7.4 will be out of support and at risk of security vulnerabilities that remain unpatched."

This is not an official statement as the actual SLA terms and conditions might state something different, but I worked as a support engineer for App Services for 3 years and we worked to assist customers regardless of your stack (support engineers never help with debugging your application code either so as long as you can support your older 7.4 app code, the support engineers will do their best to help support the app services platform and assist you to the best of their ability until you have migrated).

Let us know if you have further questions or concerns.

Answer 2

Hi @Josh Donner

I only see the announcement for PHP 7.4 on Azure App Service will no longer be supported as of 28 November 2022. PHP 7.4 security support is up to this date as well.

https://azure.microsoft.com/es-es/updates/community-support-for-php-74-is-ending-on-28-november-2022/

To answer your question directly, I do not believe that your Azure VM will have affected SLAs. With IaaS, Microsoft is responsible for the physical infrastructure (uptime of your machine), but you are responsible for the actual maintenance of the server software itself. This means that if you continue to run PHP 7.4, security patches will no longer be issued, thus you will be open to security risks going forward. Microsoft/Azure is not responsible for the software running on the machine.

SLA for Virtual Machines

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_9/

PHP Supported Versions

https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

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