assert:supports-rolling-upgrade

This tag is part of the assert category of tags, which are assertions made by the project team themselves about the maturity of their deliverables. One such assertion (or self-imposed contract) is about the rolling upgrade features that the deliverable supports.

The “assert:supports-rolling-upgrade” tag asserts that the deliverable will support minimal rolling upgrade capabilities.

Application to current deliverables

• Cinder (Block Storage service): cinder

• Heat (Orchestration service): heat

• Ironic (Bare Metal service): ironic

• Neutron (Networking service): neutron

• Nova (Compute service): nova

• Swift (Object Storage service): swift

Rationale

OpenStack components represent code that is installed and deployed on many distributed systems in order to provide services to users. Operators need to know what services support a rolling upgrade process to avoid significant downtime.

Requirements

• The deliverable is a software component of an OpenStack cloud (openstack, openstack-operations on the map) delivering a long-lived service with an API.

• The deliverable has already successfully asserted the supports-upgrade tag. All the requirements for that tag are requirements for this tag, and assertion of that tag is a requirement to assert this tag.

• The project has a defined plan that allows operators to roll out new code to subsets of services, eliminating the need to restart all services on new code simultaneously. This plan should clearly call out the supported configuration(s) that are expected to work, unless there are no such caveats. This does not require complete elimination of downtime during upgrades, but rather reducing the scope from “all services” to “some services at a time.” In other words, “restarting all API services together” is a reasonable restriction. A more restrictive tag, assert:supports-zero-downtime-upgrade removes this allowance.

• Full stack integration testing with services arranged in a mid-upgrade manner is performed on every proposed commit to validate that mixed-version services work together properly. This testing must be performed on configurations that the project considers to be its reference implementations. The arrangement(s) tested will depend on the project (i.e. should be representative of a meaningful-to-operators rolling upgrade scenario) and available testing resources. At least one representative arrangement must be tested full-stack in the gate.