Tips on designing an upgrade process

I’d like to share some of my lessons learned and pass these on.
Consider the current working version (x) sacred – the upgrade process should not touch it because you always need to provide an option to roll-back to (x) – perhaps even a couple of hours after the new version (y) has been deployed. Design hint: when upgrading, lay the new version (y) along-side and not on top of version (x). This implies a migration of configuration files at the application layer and data migration at the data layer from version (x) to version (y).

In a high-availability environment, consider is it possible to run both version (x) and (y) concurrently – this is to support the concept of a rolling upgrade where you upgrade each node in turn.

By far, the trickiest part of designing an upgrade process is considering evolutionary changes to the data schema. New tables, columns or constraints may have been added. You need to pay close attention to changes to the schema during development and always think about what this means for the migration of existing data. It’s usually a good idea to embed the version number in the name of the schema/database.

It’s essential that data created with the old version (x) is available with the new version (y) – but also, ensure that the operations the system provides on the data exhibit a consistent behavior where expected.