Generally, the OpenStack upgrade and update procedures have common stages that include pre-upgrade/update, the control plane and data plane upgrade/update, and post-upgrade/update. Moreover, during both upgrading and updating, the same tooling is used. See OpenStack upgrade tools overview for details.
| # | Stage | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Planning | Includes the creation of the maintenance plan. |
| 2 | Pre-update | Includes procedures that do not affect workability of the current OpenStack cluster state such as running the QA cycle, verifying infrastructure, configuring monitoring of workloads and services. Also, during this stage, the backups are created and additional services, servers, and systems are installed to facilitate the update process according to the plan. |
| 3 | Update | The actual update. |
| 3.1 | Control plane update | The control plane nodes are being updated. It should not have an impact on the data plane, and compatibility issues between the data plane and control plane of different minor versions are not expected. No downtime of the control plane is expected, as update is performed one by one for the control plane nodes which are in HA. |
| 3.2 | Data plane update | The data plane nodes that host the end-user data applications including the compute, storage, and gateway nodes are being updated. |
| 4 | Post update | Includes procedures that will not affect workability, such as post-update testing activities, and cleanup. |
Warning
Before you perform the update on a production environment, accomplish the procedure on a staging environment. If the staging environment does not exist, adapt the exact cluster model and launch it inside the cloud as a heat stack, which will act as a staging environment.