Best Practices for Updates and Restarts
When it comes to software updates and what that means for your systems - well that is more complicated. On the one hand, security is the primary driver of updates today and that too is non-negotiable. Patches need to be implemented as soon as possible and across all systems to maintain the strongest security.
The same holds true for software updates that carry important bug fixes, performance improvements and enhanced functionality. They too should be implemented in a timely fashion to leverage the improvements within.
But what about downtime? Depending on your environment and operational processes, when security patches and software updates are applied, you may incur minor downtime due to service restarts, and you may introduce buggy code that causes major downtime until it is rolled back or updated. The puzzle of how to update and patch in a timely fashion without downtime is a tough one, and you need to make the right architectural decisions or your environment doesn’t stand a chance of being highly available.
The solution is to rely on software that guarantees sub-second restart times, even across hundreds of nodes. This is an area where we have invested heavily and, as a result, upgrading MinIO, even at scale, is non-disruptive. In this post we will outline the philosophy behind our approach and show you how to perform the non-disruptive upgrades that your high availability object storage requires.
