Santa’s elves aren’t the only ones working hard this December, as the AngularJS team has announced the release of Angular 2 Beta. This release marks point at which further changes should be minimal and significant applications for production can be built.
Through developer preview and alpha we’ve worked closely with several large projects here at Google including AdWords, GreenTea (Google’s internal CRM system), and Google Fiber. In fact, just a few weeks ago we saw Google Fiber launch on their new Angular 2 code base. — AngularJS Blog Announcement
For those looking to upgrade, there are two paths that they are suggesting. The first is “big-bang” or just rewriting your apps to use AngularJS 2. The second approach is a hybrid model using a new ngUpgrade feature.
ngUpgrade lets you mix Angular 2 into your existing Angular 1 application. You’ll get to take advantage of Angular 2’s improved speed and APIs immediately as you replace components a bit at a time over the course of your releases. — AngularJS Blog
For more information, check out the official announcement, and you can learn more about using ngUpgrade in this blog post on thoughtRam.