[lxc-users] Newer upstream releases - Stable for production?

[Stéphane Graber]

Hi,

So it really depends on how tolerant you may be to accidental downtime
and need to occasionaly adapt scripts as new features are added.

LXD 2.0.x only gets bugfixes and security updates and so an upgrade will
never break anything that uses the LXD commands or the API.


For the newer feature releases, we don't break the REST API, only add
bits to it, but occasionaly those bits mean that some extra
configuration steps may be needed, as was the case with the network API
in 2.3 or the storage API in 2.9.

Upgrading to such releases will automatically attempt to migrate your
setup so that it keeps working and doesn't suffer any downtime. But it's
certainly not completely bug free and we do occasionaly hit issues
there.


If you do want the new features, I'd recommend that you at least stay on
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, then do this:

    apt install -t xenial-backports lxd lxd-client

This will install lxd and lxd-client from "xenial-backports" which is a
special pocket of the main Ubuntu archive. This is far preferable from
using the LXD PPA.

The LXD stable PPA is automatically generated whenever a new upstream
release has hit the current Ubuntu development release and has passed
automatic testing, which is to say that when an update hits, it would
have seen very little field testing.

xenial-backports is different in that the packages in there are the same
as the PPA, but I only push them through once I feel confident there
aren't any upgrade issues that we should address.


One recent example of that was the storage API. PPA users would have
gotten LXD 2.9, 2.9.1, 2.9.2, 2.10, 2.10.1 and 2.11 in quick sucession
as we were sorting out some upgrade issues with the storage API.

Users of xenial-backports were on LXD 2.8 up until yesterday when I
pushed LXD 2.12 to it as we are now feeling confident that all upgrade
issues that were reported have been satisfyingly resolved.


One last note. LXD doesn't support downgrading its database, that means
that if you upgrade from 2.0.x to some 2.x release, there is no going
back. You can't downgrade back to 2.0.x afterwards. You can move LXD
containers from a new release to a server running an older release as we
way to do a two stage downgrade, but you may need to alter their
configurations a bit for this to succeed (remove any option key that
came from a newer release).

Stéphane

On Tue, Apr 04, 2017 at 02:55:32PM +0200, Gabriel Marais wrote:
> Hi Guys
> 
> I would like to take advantage in some of the new(er) features available in
> releases higher than 2.0.x
> 
> Would it be advisable to upgrade to 2.12 to be used in a production
> environment?
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Regards
> 
> Gabriel Marais
> 
> Office: +27 861 466 546 x 7001
> Mobile: +27 83 663 2222
> Mail: gabriel.j.marais at gmail.com
> 
> Unit 11, Ground Floor, Berkley Office Park
> Cnr Bauhinia & Witch Hazel Str,
> Highveld, Centurion, South-Africa
> 0157
> 
> PO Box 15846, Lyttelton, South Africa, 0140
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
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