Release Management

A key function of release management is software upgrade. This chapter discusses traditional strategies for software upgrades and proposes alternate strategies that leverage cloud mechanisms to mitigate some of the service quality risks associated with executing software upgrades. There are two fundamental software upgrade strategies with finite hardware resources: offline software upgrade and online software upgrade. Cloud-enabled software upgrade strategies can reduce the complexity and mitigate the risk associated with traditional software upgrade by providing a much more automated, complete management of the software upgrade. Block party and one driver per bus are two general strategies for managing cloud-enabled software upgrade. Persistent application data need to be maintained during the software upgrade process, and the data schema may also need to be evolved if there are any schema changes between releases. Service orchestration can be crucial for software upgrade to assist in meeting service quality requirements.