My distributed network consists of atleast 10 servers, all of which are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. This was a design decision, so that we would have a more consistent back-end, as far as the Operating System was concerned..

this is also so that we can more easily plan our maintenance workload, with anticipation of the distribution release cycle.

However, I have noticed that on one of our development machines, that which runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop Distribution, that there was recently a Hardware Stack Upgrade.

We installed this to our machines within the distributed network, instead of upgrading to the latest version of Ubuntu. The idea being that we have the latest candidates for hardware and Kernel support, while still running the long term service distribution which is currently available.

I logged on the other day, to find out that Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released.

My Question(s) is this:

How does this effect the software/kernel/OS update, patch, and development cycle of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS?

Is Ubutnu 12.04 Still in service until 2017, such as it was that last time I checked?

Is there any reason to upgrade our machines to 14.04 LTS, or should be just wait until 12.04 LTS is no longer supported?

Thanks for your time, to whom ever answered this for me!