Julie White
&
Whitney Hill
When considering a website upgrade, many business stakeholders probably think about the frontend, i.e., how the website looks or the features users interact with. Perhaps less often considered is the importance of upgrading the backend; that is, the databases, applications, and servers powering all the behind-the-scenes activity. Infrastructure support and upgrades are necessary but often performed as a separate project from any improvements to design or user experience, rather than as part of a holistic update project.
With that in mind, it helps to have an understanding of why upgrading the backend should be considered a necessary part of any website upgrade project. We offer 3 reasons, focusing on our specialty of Django-based websites. Upgrading:
- increases security,
- reduces development and maintenance costs, and
- ensures support for future growth.
Read on for details about each of these factors, or get in touch to speak with us about them.
Increase the security of your site
The Django framework is continually being improved and certain releases are designated as “Long Term Support” (LTS) versions. LTS versions receive security updates and bug fixes for a three-year period, as opposed to the usual 18 months. When your website uses an unsupported version of Django, newly uncovered bugs are not being fixed, patched, or supported by the Django and Open Source communities. No new security fixes are planned for retired versions, a situation that carries a number of risks.
These risks come in the form of vulnerabilities - weaknesses that leave your site open to attack. Attacks could potentially cause servers to go down, data to be leaked or stolen, or features to stop working. If a vulnerability is taken advantage of, it could lead to a loss of reputation and potentially a loss of revenue or legal ramifications. With high consumer expectations and increasing requirements from international data protection laws, this could prove disastrous for organizations or web applications without stringent upgrade plans in place.
If your site is using an older version of Django, a security patch may not be released for your version of Django. This means that a fix for the vulnerability would have to be authored and implemented by your development team, which, over time, is less cost effective than upgrading to the LTS version.
Upgrading to an LTS release offers significant benefits, including security updates as needed. Fixes for security issues and vulnerabilities are implemented quickly. There is no need to implement fixes yourself (or hire out expensive custom work). Taking proactive steps to upgrade reduces risk and can save you the trouble of expensive, reactive steps in the event of a cyberattack.
Reduce development and maintenance costs
In addition to improving security and ensuring support for future growth, upgrading also offers productivity benefits for development teams. Many extra lines of code may be required in order to continue to backport fixes for your website or app as issues occur or features are added. Adding all this code and continuing to use old versions of Django will eventually lead to technical debt, where the short-term fixes and outdated code end up creating extra work to patch and maintain a project in the long run.
Custom fixes and patches also introduce a large learning curve for new developers or contractors. The issue here is two-fold: Onboarding new developers is more time consuming than it needs to be, and if key personnel leave, you may lose knowledge which is integral to maintaining or updating the project.
Upgrading your version of Django reduces technical debt by eliminating old, no-longer-needed code. It also allows your development team to reduce the time and money spent on addressing security issues and bug fixes, freeing up time for them to work on website improvements or revenue-generating work.
Ensure support for future growth
Extensibility is the practice of keeping future growth in mind when working on a development project. We often hear from potential clients who built a website or web app in the early days of their business, when releasing features quickly took precedence over planning for future growth. Whether that growth is in the form of more data, more users, or more functionality, planning for it impacts current design and development decisions. When growth isn’t considered, scaling up the project and adding new features requires a disproportionate amount of work. If the original development was not intended to support the changes being made, custom workarounds must be introduced.
Where does this leave your web project? Technologically out of date, unnecessarily clunky, and less able to deliver a quality experience to site visitors.
Upgrading Django from an out-of-date version to a more recent LTS version not only provides access to software that is constantly receiving bug and security fixes; it also simplifies the upgrade process when a new version of Django is released with a feature needed by your project. If your project is two, three, even four releases behind, upgrading all at once could be cost-prohibitive. By regularly upgrading, you gain near-immediate access to new features in Django if and when needed. In other words, you can depend on a highly-engaged developer community actively working to add features rather than reinventing the wheel by developing them yourself.
Next steps
The wider open source development community is producing great tools and enhancements every day and the community continues to grow in size and support. Your project may find itself left behind if Django is left unsupported - or growing along with the community if you upgrade.
So where to get started? For clients considering an upgrade, we generally advise moving up to the most recent LTS release. While the latest version of Django offers the newest features, the LTS version represents a version of Django that will be more cost efficient to maintain given the community’s three-year commitment to releasing updates for it.
As Django specialists, Caktus developers have experience upgrading and maintaining Django-based websites. We have successfully completed upgrades for numerous clients and offer an upgrade protection plan that ensures your site will be maintained year to year as well as updated to the most recent LTS version of Django. Sound good? Get in touch to start the process of upgrading and securing your website, or take a look at some of our other services if you’ve got a larger project in mind.
