OpenStack is a very cool and cost-efficient cloud open source technology, but the 6 monthly upgrade of each new release might be a terrible challenge for you and for your business to keep it up and operating smoothly.
And even if we tried to find a solution to skip the six months new version upgrade, the bad news is that there is no way to skip it! You need to upgrade your cloud environment to each one of the OpenStack releases — n to n+1 upgrades only. In this case, is there any way we can make this challenging and complex upgrade process easier?
Yes! We have developed a solution that will not only make your life easier keeping your business productivity up and your systems running, but it will also make you forget about any worry you might have with the painful upgrading OpenStack each 6 months: you can now enjoy new capabilities and enhancements in your OpenStack cloud with Zero-Downtime upgrade!
OpenStack aims to get your cloud up and running. Your OpenStack should have high uptime, fully operational at all times, hyper-efficient and scalable. But what’s more, it needs to be upgradeable! That’s why, in this article we are focusing on the importance of the OpenStack Upgrade phase.
The upgrade means you can transition your OpenStack to a new, much stable OpenStack up to date version following its release. However, from the business’ perspective, the upgrade may have negative impact if it interrupts the smooth operation of the business environment, causing significant problems to your customers.
Resource needed for OpenStack upgrade
There are some important aspects to keep in mind when planning the OpenStack upgrade:
Check the OpenStack Foundation release notes carefully to discover if there are any incompatibilities between the versions
Take into consideration the impact of the upgrade to your end users or to the business
- Ensure database consistency throughout the process; otherwise your environment might become unstable
- Be ready to face a failed upgrade: prepare a roll the environment back to the previous release
Create a test environment similar to your production environment to test the upgrade procedure
Develop automation for the upgrade process
What to do and what to avoid in the Upgrade?
- Manual upgrades are not an option: your manual upgrade process is prone to failure when doing manually repetitive tasks on the complex topology and relationship between the cloud services. The manual process can fail due to its complexity.
- Automate the upgrade process: The upgrade process should be fully automated. If it is done right, you should be able to achieve live zero-downtime upgrade. Business is secured and no service interrupted!
- Wrong order of upgrade steps can break the cloud: Not upgrading the cloud services in the right order may end up breaking your cloud system.
- Automate the upgrade in the right order: the upgrade automation should take care of all the steps that needs to be followed in the right order: OpenStack Identity (Keystone), OpenStack Compute (Nova), OpenStack Image service (Glance), OpenStack Networking (Neutron), OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), OpenStack dashboard (Horizon), OpenStack Orchestration (Heat), and other OpenStack components deployed, as well as supporting services such as Message Queue (RabbitMQ).
- New, deprecated or removed API will cause your upgrade to fail: each new OpenStack release is coming with new API versions which will lead to a failed upgrade.
- Automate the upgrade process to eliminate the risk of API changes leading to a failure in your upgrade. Automation need to take into account API changes in the new OpenStack release, and be ready to seamlessly accommodate them in upgrading your cloud.
- Change-tracked at all times: Failure may happen due to knowledge transfer and retention gaps arising from changes not being tracked. There should be no unknown states in your OpenStack cloud.
- Idempotent should not be a luxury option: the operation can be run multiple times but it should only be applied once.
The future is here: Zero-Downtime Upgrades
In order to provide high quality service, it is essential to be able to perform the necessary OpenStack version upgrades, in synchrony with OpenStack releases. Building on a cloud operations automation software platform, FishOS Upgrader uniquely enables live zero-downtime upgrades.
Upgrading your OpenStack cloud can now be a simple task if the right approach is embraced: AUTOMATION! Precise execution can be completed within few hours, without impacting any users nor the business.