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Upgrade Strategies for Your Rafay MKS Cluster

In the past, there was only one way to upgrade your Rafay provisioned upstream Kubernetes cluster. The worker nodes were upgrade sequentially one worker node at a time. For large clusters with 100s of worker nodes, upgrades can take a very long time. In this blog, we will describe optimizations we have incorporated in our August 2023 release to allow users to configure faster upgrades. We now offer two ways to upgrade, and you have the freedom to choose the one that suits you best.

Upgrade strategies

Sequential Upgrade Strategy

By default, your upgrades will follow the Sequential upgrade strategy. This means each worker node is upgraded one after the other. This is a time tested and reliable approach that works well in all situations.

Sequential strategy

Concurrent Upgrade Strategy

The Concurrent strategy is the newly introduced strategy. With this strategy, you can upgrade multiple worker nodes at once. This can significantly speed up the time required to upgrade the cluster. This strategy is especially useful if you're managing clusters with 100s of worker nodes.

Concurrent strategy

Here's how the Concurrent strategy works:

You can decide how many worker nodes to upgrade at the same time. Whether it's 10% or 50% of your worker nodes, the choice is entirely yours. This customization ensures your upgrades align perfectly with your specific needs.

The benefits of the Concurrent strategy are:

  • Faster Upgrades: Upgrading multiple nodes at once reduces the time needed for the upgrade, resulting in less downtime and disruption to your operations.

  • Improved Efficiency: For larger clusters, where sequential upgrades can be slow, the concurrent approach makes the most of your resources.

  • Tailored to Your Needs: You can adjust the upgrade percentage or node count to fit your environment and goals precisely.

So, when you face the challenge of upgrading a cluster with 100s of worker nodes, the Concurrent upgrade strategy should be the ideal choice. It makes upgrades quicker, smoother, and more efficient by allowing you to upgrade multiple nodes simultaneously.

Conclusion

Our latest release offers you more control over your cluster upgrades. You can now choose the upgrade strategy that best suits your needs,The choice is yours, making upgrades more flexible and tailored to your requirements.

Try It Out

Sign up here for a free trial and try it out yourself. We have invested heavily on curated Get Started Guides that will help you get familiar with capabilities of Rafay's Kubernetes Operations Platform.

Sincere thanks to readers of our blog who spend time reading our product blogs. Please Contact the Rafay Product Team if you would like us to write about other topics.