[magnum][heat] Rolling system upgrades

Krzysztof Klimonda kklimonda at syntaxhighlighted.com
Tue Jan 26 08:42:06 UTC 2021


Hi Feilong,

Regarding first point, could you share your idea on how to fix it? I haven't yet put much thought into that, but solving system-level upgrades for nodes (and getting it to work with auto healing/auto scaling etc.) is something I'll have to tackle myself if we want to go into production with full feature-set, and I'd be happy to put work into that.

Regarding image updates, perhaps that has been fixed since ussuri? I'm testing it on some ussuri snapshot, my nodes use images for root disk, and I can see that the updated image property from cluster template is not populated into heat stack itself.
I see your point about lack of communication from magnum to the cluster, but perhaps that could be handled in a similar way as OS::Heat::Software* updates, with an agent running on nodes? Perhaps heat's pre-update hook could be used, with agent clearing it after node has been drained. I'm not overly familiar with heat inner workings, and I was hoping that someone with more heat experience could chime in and give some idea how that could be handled.
Perhaps OS::Heat::Software* resources already provide a way to handle this (although I'm not sure how could that work given that they are probably updated only after server resource update is processed).

I feel like getting images to update in a non-invasive way would be a cleaner and safer way of handling OS-level upgrades, although I'm not sure how feasible it is in the end.

-- 
  Krzysztof Klimonda
  kklimonda at syntaxhighlighted.com

On Sat, Jan 23, 2021, at 18:55, feilong wrote:
> Hi Krzysztof,
> 
> Thanks for raising this topic because I'm planning to do improvements
> for this area. I would like to help as the original author of this
> feature. Now let me explain the current situation:
> 
> 1. The first method is designed to work for both Fedora Atomic and
> Fedora CoreOS. Though I agree after upgrade, the node image will be
> remain the old name and ID which will bring troubles for auto healing
> later. That's the problem I'm trying to fix but it's not easy. As for
> the new node, I think it's a bug and I think I know how to fix it. Your
> concern about upgrade from a very old node's OS to a quite new OS
> version is valid :(
> 
> 2. It works under conditions. The node should be image based instead of
> volume based, because AFAIK, Nova still doesn't support volume based
> instance rebuild. Did you try this with image based nodes? As for the
> drain part, it's because we would like to achieve a zero-downtime
> upgrade (at least it's my goal for this), so each node will be drained
> before upgrading. However, I didn't see a way to manage the
> orchestration to call a k8s drain before doing the rebuild of the node,
> because it's out of the control of Magnum. Heat is a like a black box at
> this stage. Also, even if we can have a chance to call k8s drain to
> drain the node, it's impossible to do that if the cluster is a private
> cluster. Private cluster means Magnum control plane cannot reach the k8s
> API.
> 
> Again, thank you raising this and I'm happy to help to address it.
> 
> 
> On 22/01/21 10:03 pm, Krzysztof Klimonda wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > While testing magnum, a problem of upgrades came up - while work has been done to make kubernetes upgrades without interruption, operating system upgrades seem to be handled only partially.
> >
> > According to the documentation, two ways of upgrading system are available:
> > - via specifying ostree_commit or ostree_remote labels in the cluster template used for upgrade
> > - via specifying a new image in the cluster template used for upgrade
> >
> > The first one is specific to Fedora Atomic (and, while probably untested, seems to be mostly working with Fedora CoreOS) but it has some drawbacks. Firstly, due to base image staying the same we require this image for the life of the cluster, even if OS has already been upgraded. Secondly, using this method only upgrades existing instances and new instances (spawned via scaling cluster up) will not be upgraded. Thirdly, even if that is fixed I'm worried that at some point upgrading from old base image to some future ostree snapshot will fail (there is also cost associated with diff growing with each release).
> >
> > The second method, of specifying a new image in the cluster template used for upgrade, comes with an ugly warning about nodes not being drained properly before server rebuild (and it actually doesn't seem to be working anyway as the new image parameter is not being passed to the heat template on upgrade). This does however seem like a more valid approach in general.
> >
> > I'm not that familar with Heat, and the documentation of various OS::Heat::Software* resources seems inconclusive, but is there no way of executing some code before instance is rebuilt? If not, how are other projects and users handling this in general?
> >
> -- 
> Cheers & Best regards,
> Feilong Wang (王飞龙)
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Senior Cloud Software Engineer
> Tel: +64-48032246
> Email: flwang at catalyst.net.nz
> Catalyst IT Limited
> Level 6, Catalyst House, 150 Willis Street, Wellington
> ------------------------------------------------------ 
> 
> 
> 
>



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