Keeping software up-to-date

The collective desire to avoid downtime makes everyone less likely to perform software upgrades… however, not regularly performing updates usually causes even longer and nastier outages as the upgrade-debt builds up.

– Karla Saur, https://medium.com/@karla.saur/rethinking-live-software-updates-with-kubernetes-ac8c0c85d13f

I started working at Microsoft on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) team a few months ago, and I was really excited when my first assigned task was to upgrade all of the running instances of Docker across all of our AKS Kubernetes clusters. I have spent a lot of time thinking about dynamic software upgrades on a large scale, but before I joined Microsoft, I had mostly worked on long running, somewhat stateful, C-based server programs. Upgrading something so critical as the underlying container system with a very large quantity of VM nodes across 15 geographic regions with a very large number of connected production customers was a whole new fun (scary?) challenge!

– Karla Saur, https://medium.com/@karla.saur/rethinking-live-software-updates-with-kubernetes-ac8c0c85d13f