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

Mini Tutorial
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 4:00pm-5:30pm

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Overflow

Thomas A. Limoncelli, Stack Overflow

Tom is an internationally recognized author, speaker, and system administrator. His new book, The Practice of Cloud System Administration (http://the-cloud-book.com), launched last year. His past books include Time Management for System Administrators (O'Reilly) and The Practice of System and Network Administration (Pearson). In 2005, he received the USENIX LISA Outstanding Achievement Award. He works in New York City at Stack Exchange, home of Careers.Stackoverflow.com, and previously worked at Google and Bell Labs. His blog is http://EverythingSysadmin.com and he tweets @YesThatTom.

BibTeX
@conference {208702,
author = {Thomas A. Limoncelli},
title = {Live Upgrades on Running Systems: 8 Ways to Upgrade a Running Service with Zero Downtime},
year = {2015},
address = {Washington, D.C.},
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