Rails Software Update

Getting the Ready software back up to date has become a greater priority recently, as we have begun to run into software version incompatibility issues. The current version of Ready and the middleware it runs on dated back mostly to 2015, and we are entering an end-of-support situation for receiving security and stability updates on the 2015-versions of all that software.

Thus, in February 2020, the Ready Engineering team put a lot of resources in upgrading our middleware software. The benefits, both immediate and long-term, of these efforts are increased security and speed improvements.  Security is best served when software can be easily kept up to date, so that if an alert is issued we can react quickly to apply a fix. When we were on such older software, updating a single component in the face of a security event was much more daunting and time-consuming, leading to a longer window of vulnerability. This process is still on-going, as we have already been able to elevate Rails to a version 5.0, which was released in 2016 and current until the following year. We still need to get Rails upgraded to at least a 2019 version, if not newer, to be fully up to date and enjoy full support. Even better, however, is that a vast majority of the other middleware was fully upgraded to versions released in 2019 and still considered current today.