Chapter 5. Upgrading a Cluster

There are two methods for performing OpenShift Container Platform cluster upgrades. You can either do in-place upgrades (automated or manual), or upgrade using a blue-green deployment method.

In-place Upgrades

With in-place upgrades, the cluster upgrade is performed on all hosts in a single, running cluster: first masters and then nodes. Pods are evacuated off of nodes and recreated on other running nodes before a node upgrade begins; this helps reduce downtime of user applications.

If you installed using the quick or advanced installation and the ~/.config/openshift/installer.cfg.yml or inventory file that was used is available, you can perform an automated in-place upgrade. Alternatively, you can upgrade in-place manually.

Blue-green Deployments

The blue-green deployment upgrade method follows a similar flow to the in-place method: masters and etcd servers are still upgraded first, however a parallel environment is created for new nodes instead of upgrading them in-place.

This method allows administrators to switch traffic from the old set of nodes (e.g., the "blue" deployment) to the new set (e.g., the "green" deployment) after the new deployment has been verified. If a problem is detected, it is also then easy to rollback to the old deployment quickly.

If you installed using the advanced installation and the inventory file that was used is available, you can use the upgrade playbook to automate the OpenShift cluster upgrade process. If you installed using the quick installation method and a ~/.config/openshift/installer.cfg.yml file is available, you can use the installer to perform the automated upgrade.

The automated upgrade performs the following steps for you:

To prepare for an automated upgrade:

To persist /usr/share/openshift/examples/ on all masters:

mkdir /usr/share/openshift/examples
scp -R /usr/share/ansible/openshift-ansible/roles/openshift_examples/files/examples/v3.6/* user@masterx:/usr/share/openshift/examples

You must be logged in as a cluster administrative user on the master host for the upgrade to succeed:

$ oc login

After satisfying these steps, there are two methods for running the automated upgrade:

Choose and follow one of these methods.

If you installed OpenShift Container Platform using the quick installation method, you should have an installation configuration file located at ~/.config/openshift/installer.cfg.yml. The installer requires this file to start an upgrade.

The installer supports upgrading between minor versions of OpenShift Container Platform (one minor version at a time, e.g., 3.3 to 3.4) as well as between asynchronous errata updates within a minor version (e.g., 3.4.z).

If you have an older format installation configuration file in ~/.config/openshift/installer.cfg.yml from an installation of a previous cluster version, the installer will attempt to upgrade the file to the new supported format. If you do not have an installation configuration file of any format, you can create one manually.

To start an upgrade with the quick installer:

You can run automated upgrade playbooks using Ansible directly, similar to the advanced installation method, if you have an inventory file. Playbooks can be run using the ansible-playbook command.

The same v3_4 upgrade playbooks can be used for either of the following scenarios:

$ ansible-playbook -i <path/to/inventory/file> \
    </path/to/upgrade/playbook> \
    -e openshift_upgrade_nodes_serial="20%"

$ ansible-playbook -i <path/to/inventory/file> \
    </path/to/upgrade/playbook> \
    -e openshift_upgrade_nodes_serial="2" \
    -e openshift_upgrade_nodes_label="region=group1"

If you have previously deployed the EFK logging stack and want to upgrade to the latest logging component images, the steps must be performed manually as shown in Manual Upgrades.

If you have previously deployed cluster metrics, you must manually update to the latest metric components.

To verify the upgrade:

As an alternative to performing an automated upgrade, you can manually upgrade your OpenShift cluster. To manually upgrade without disruption, it is important to upgrade each component as documented in this topic.

Before you begin your upgrade, familiarize yourself now with the entire procedure. Specific releases may require additional steps to be performed at key points before or during the standard upgrade process.

To prepare for a manual upgrade, follow these steps:

Before upgrading any stand-alone nodes, upgrade the master components (which provide the control plane for the cluster).

$ oc edit ep/kubernetes -n default

After a cluster upgrade, the recommended default cluster roles may be updated. To check if an update is recommended for your environment, you can run:

# oadm policy reconcile-cluster-roles

This command outputs a list of roles that are out of date and their new proposed values. For example:

# oadm policy reconcile-cluster-roles
apiVersion: v1
items:
- apiVersion: v1
  kind: ClusterRole
  metadata:
    creationTimestamp: null
    name: admin
  rules:
  - attributeRestrictions: null
    resources:
    - builds/custom
...

You can either modify this output to re-apply any local policy changes you have made, or you can automatically apply the new policy using the following process:

After upgrading your masters, you can upgrade your nodes. When restarting the atomic-openshift-node service, there will be a brief disruption of outbound network connectivity from running pods to services while the service proxy is restarted. The length of this disruption should be very short and scales based on the number of services in the entire cluster.

One at at time for each node that is not also a master, you must disable scheduling and evacuate its pods to other nodes, then upgrade packages and restart services.

If you have previously deployed a router, the router deployment configuration must be upgraded to apply updates contained in the router image. To upgrade your router without disrupting services, you must have previously deployed a highly-available routing service.

Edit your router’s deployment configuration. For example, if it has the default router name:

# oc edit dc/router

Apply the following changes:

...
spec:
 template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - env:
        ...
        image: registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose-haproxy-router:<tag> 1
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        ...

You should see one router pod updated and then the next.

The registry must also be upgraded for changes to take effect in the registry image. If you have used a PersistentVolumeClaim or a host mount point, you may restart the registry without losing the contents of your registry. Storage for the Registry details how to configure persistent storage for the registry.

Edit your registry’s deployment configuration:

# oc edit dc/docker-registry

Apply the following changes:

...
spec:
 template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - env:
        ...
        image: registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/ose-docker-registry:<tag> 1
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        ...

By default, the quick and advanced installation methods automatically create default image streams, InstantApp templates, and database service templates in the openshift project, which is a default project to which all users have view access. These objects were created during installation from the JSON files located under the /usr/share/ansible/openshift-ansible/roles/openshift_examples/files/examples/ directory.

Update the packages that provide the example JSON files. On a subscribed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 system where you can run the CLI as a user with cluster-admin permissions, install or update to the latest version of the atomic-openshift-utils package, which should also update the openshift-ansible- packages:

# yum update atomic-openshift-utils

To persist /usr/share/openshift/examples/ on the first master:

scp -R /usr/share/ansible/openshift-ansible/roles/openshift_examples/files/examples/v3.6/* user@master1:/usr/share/openshift/examples/

To persist /usr/share/openshift/examples/ on all masters:

mkdir /usr/share/openshift/examples
scp -R /usr/share/ansible/openshift-ansible/roles/openshift_examples/files/examples/v3.6/* user@masterx:/usr/share/openshift/examples

The openshift-ansible-roles package provides the latest example JSON files.

Now, content can be updated. Without running the automated upgrade playbooks, the content is not updated in /usr/share/openshift/.

After updating the default image streams, you may also want to ensure that the images within those streams are updated. For each image stream in the default openshift project, you can run:

# oc import-image -n openshift <imagestream>

For example, get the list of all image streams in the default openshift project:

# oc get is -n openshift
NAME     DOCKER REPO                                                      TAGS                   UPDATED
mongodb  registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/mongodb-24-rhel7           2.4,latest,v3.1.1.6    16 hours ago
mysql    registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/mysql-55-rhel7             5.5,latest,v3.1.1.6    16 hours ago
nodejs   registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/nodejs-010-rhel7           0.10,latest,v3.1.1.6   16 hours ago
...

Update each image stream one at a time:

# oc import-image -n openshift nodejs
The import completed successfully.

Name:			nodejs
Created:		10 seconds ago
Labels:			<none>
Annotations:		openshift.io/image.dockerRepositoryCheck=2016-07-05T19:20:30Z
Docker Pull Spec:	172.30.204.22:5000/openshift/nodejs

Tag	Spec								Created		PullSpec						Image
latest	4								9 seconds ago	registry.access.redhat.com/rhscl/nodejs-4-rhel7:latest	570ad8ed927fd5c2c9554ef4d9534cef808dfa05df31ec491c0969c3bd372b05
4	registry.access.redhat.com/rhscl/nodejs-4-rhel7:latest		9 seconds ago	<same>							570ad8ed927fd5c2c9554ef4d9534cef808dfa05df31ec491c0969c3bd372b05
0.10	registry.access.redhat.com/openshift3/nodejs-010-rhel7:latest	9 seconds ago	<same>							a1ef33be788a28ec2bdd48a9a5d174ebcfbe11c8e986d2996b77f5bccaaa4774

Use the following to upgrade an already-deployed EFK logging stack.

After upgrading an already-deployed Cluster Metrics install, you must update to a newer version of the metrics components.

To upgrade cluster metrics:

Some OpenShift Container Platform releases may have additional instructions specific to that release that must be performed to fully apply the updates across the cluster. This section will be updated over time as new asynchronous updates are released for OpenShift Container Platform 3.4.

See the OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 Release Notes to review the latest release notes.

To verify the upgrade, first check that all nodes are marked as Ready:

# oc get nodes
NAME                        STATUS                     AGE
master.example.com          Ready,SchedulingDisabled   165d
node1.example.com           Ready                      165d
node2.example.com           Ready                      165d

Then, verify that you are running the expected versions of the docker-registry and router images, if deployed. Replace <tag> with v3.4.1.44.38 for the latest version.

# oc get -n default dc/docker-registry -o json | grep \"image\"
    "image": "openshift3/ose-docker-registry:<tag>",
# oc get -n default dc/router -o json | grep \"image\"
    "image": "openshift3/ose-haproxy-router:<tag>",

You can use the diagnostics tool on the master to look for common issues:

# oadm diagnostics
...
[Note] Summary of diagnostics execution:
[Note] Completed with no errors or warnings seen.

The blue-green deployment upgrade method follows a similar flow to the in-place method: masters and etcd servers are still upgraded first, however a parallel environment is created for new node hosts instead of upgrading them in-place.

This method allows administrators to switch traffic from the old set of node hosts (e.g., the blue deployment) to the new set (e.g., the green deployment) after the new deployment has been verified. If a problem is detected, it is also then easy to rollback to the old deployment quickly.

While blue-green is a proven and valid strategy for deploying just about any software, there are always trade-offs. Not all environments have the same uptime requirements or the resources to properly perform blue-green deployments.

In an OpenShift Container Platform environment, the most suitable candidate for blue-green deployments are the node hosts. All user processes run on these systems and even critical pieces of OpenShift Container Platform infrastructure are self-hosted on these resources. Uptime is most important for these workloads and the additional complexity of blue-green deployments can be justified.

The exact implementation of this approach varies based on your requirements. Often the main challenge is having the excess capacity to facilitate such an approach.

After you have upgraded your master and etcd hosts using method described for In-place Upgrades, use the following sections to prepare your environment for a blue-green upgrade of the remaining node hosts.

A common practice is to scale the registry and router pods until they are migrated to new (green) infrastructure node hosts. For these pods, a canary deployment approach is commonly used.

Scaling these pods up will make them immediately active on the new infrastructure nodes. Pointing their deployment configuration to the new image initiates a rolling update. However, because of node anti-affinity, and the fact that the blue nodes are still unschedulable, the deployments to the old nodes will fail.

At this point, the registry and router deployments can be scaled down to the original number of pods. At any given point, the original number of pods is still available so no capacity is lost and downtime should be avoided.

In order for pods to be migrated from the blue environment to the green, the required container images must be pulled. Network latency and load on the registry can cause delays if there is not sufficient capacity built in to the environment.

Often, the best way to minimize impact to the running system is to trigger new pod deployments that will land on the new nodes. Accomplish this by importing new image streams.

Major releases of OpenShift Container Platform (and sometimes asynchronous errata updates) introduce new image streams for builder images for users of Source-to-Image (S2I). You can Upon import, any builds or deployments configured with image change triggers are automatically created.

Another benefit of triggering the builds is that it does a fairly good job of fetching the majority of the ancillary images to all node hosts such as the various builder images, the pod infrastructure image, and deployers. Everything else can be moved over using node evacuation in a later step and will proceed more quickly as a result.

When you are ready to continue with the upgrade process, follow these steps to warm the green nodes:

For larger deployments, it is possible to have other labels that help determine how evacuation can be coordinated. The most conservative approach for avoiding downtime is to evacuate one node host at a time.

If services are composed of pods using zone anti-affinity, then an entire zone can be evacuated at once. It is important to ensure that the storage volumes used are available in the new zone as this detail can vary among cloud providers.

In OpenShift Container Platform 3.2 and later, a node host evacuation is triggered whenever the node service is stopped. Node labeling is very important and can cause issues if nodes are mislabled or commands are run on nodes with generalized labels. Exercise caution if master hosts are also labeled with color=blue.

When you are ready to continue with the upgrade process, follow these steps.

Updating or upgrading your operating system (OS), by either changing OS versions or updating the system software, can impact the OpenShift Container Platform software running on those machines. In particular, these updates can affect the iptables rules or ovs flows that OpenShift Container Platform requires to operate.

Use the following to safely upgrade the OS on a host: