Developer Briefing — July 8, 2025
Node.js 18 reached end of life on April 30, 2025; by July engineering teams must finish runtime upgrades to maintain security patches and comply with vendor support policies.
Executive briefing: The Node.js Release Working Group ended security support for Node.js 18 (Hydrogen) on April 30, 2025. Cloud providers and serverless platforms are deprecating Node 18 runtimes through summer 2025, leaving workloads without OpenSSL patches or V8 backports if upgrades lag. Organisations should standardise on Node 20 (Iron) or Node 22 (Jod) and update package management, CI/CD, and observability pipelines accordingly.
Engineering checkpoints
- Runtime inventory. Scan containers, serverless functions, and build pipelines for Node.js 18 references, including Docker base images and nvm defaults.
- Dependency validation. Rebuild applications against Node.js 20/22, updating native add-ons and rebuilding node-gyp modules to handle ABI changes.
- Platform alignment. Migrate managed services—such as AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure App Service—to supported runtimes before vendor cutoff dates.
Operational priorities
- Performance testing. Benchmark workloads under Node.js 20/22 to validate startup times, heap usage, and HTTP throughput.
- Security hardening. Enable updated security features (for example, permission model previews and improved OpenSSL 3.0 posture) available in current LTS releases.
- Release governance. Update service-level objectives and change management plans so feature teams deploy upgraded runtimes ahead of quarterly patch cycles.
Sources
Zeph Tech coordinates Node.js upgrade sprints, covering runtime baselines, dependency remediation, and platform migrations before managed service deprecations.