Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service With Zero Downtime

LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.

Mini Tutorial
Friday, November 14, 2014 - 9:00am-10:30am

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange, Inc.

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Exchange, Inc.

Thomas A. Limoncelli is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His best known books include Time Management for System Administrators (OReilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley). He works in New York City at Stack Exchange, home of ServerFault.com and StackOverflow.com. Previously he’s worked at small and large companies including Google and Bell Labs. http://EverythingSysadmin.com is his blog. His new book, “The Practice of Cloud System Administration” has just been released.

BibTeX
@conference {209044,
author = {Thomas A. Limoncelli},
title = {Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service With Zero Downtime},
year = {2014},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
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Description: 

How do you upgrade your service while it is running? This class covers nine techniques from the new book by Limoncelli/Chalup/Hogan, “The Practice of Cloud System Administration”... eight of which don’t require downtime. Learn best practices from Google, Facebook, and other successful companies and apply them to your environment. Techniques include: The Google “Canary” process, Facebook “Dark Launches”, proportional shedding, feature toggles, Erlang live-code upgrades, and live SQL and NoSQL schema changes.

Who should attend: 

Sysadmins that run web-based services, or services that involve many machines.

Take back to work: 
  • 8 ways to upgrade live systems without downtime
  • Techniques for cautious upgrades you may not have thought of
  • How to change SQL schemas without requiring downtime
  • Continuous Integration as a stepping stone to Continuous Deployment
Topics include: 
  • Upgrade while the system is down (not viable for live upgrades)
  • Rolling upgrades
  • Google’s “canary” upgrade system
  • Proportional Shedding
  • Feature Toggles
  • Facebook’s Dark Launch system
  • Upgrades that involve SQL and NoSQL schema changes.
  • Languages that support live code upgrades
  • Continuous Deployment