by Mark Schoeni Posted in Business | July 24, 2024 3 min read Cloudera recently unveiled the latest version of Cloudera Private Cloud Base with the Zero Downtime Upgrade (ZDU) feature to enhance your user experience.The goal of ZDU is to make upgrades simpler for you and your stakeholders by increasing the availability of Cloudera’s services.How Do You Keep IT Infrastructure (and Buses) Running and Avoid Downtime? Before I dive into the depths of ZDU, let me provide an analogy inspired by a customer.
Citizens of large cities heavily depend on their local metro systems to plan their day-to-day lives.People need to get to work, go to the doctor, and get groceries, and it’s up to their local transportation department to ensure they make it to their destinations reliably.Managing IT infrastructure starts to look like a city’s transportation infrastructure when you realize that end users also depend on the reliability of IT systems to complete work and get home on time.
IT organizations have the thankless job of ensuring infrastructure is up to date and patched against the latest vulnerabilities while downtime is kept to a minimum.Similarly, transportation agencies reduce downtime through innovations like automatic inflating tire systems; so it’s about time we innovate too.That begs the question – if clusters are like buses, how do I inflate the tires while the bus is en route? Meaning, how do I keep my infrastructure running and avoid downtime? Enter Zero Downtime Upgrades ZDU is an answer to the increased demands on IT infrastructure brought on by internal stakeholders and external customers becoming global.
The days when IT infrastructure could be brought down at night or on weekends to apply updates are disappearing.Similar to how a bus needs tune-ups, IT infrastructure needs maintenance to perform major upgrades, apply performance enhancements to scale workloads, or patch vulnerabilities to keep your environments safe.Cloudera helps you with this maintenance by delivering improvements and vulnerability patches in Service Packs and Cumulative Hotfixes (CHFs) <Cumulative Hotfix Blog>.
Although applying Service Packs and CHFs is a straightforward process, you do need to restart services.Therefore, Cloudera Private Cloud Base needs to adopt a fundamental change to the upgrade and patch process to reduce and eventually eliminate workload downtime.ZDU isn’t Cloudera’s first experience with providing the ability to upgrade services with no downtime. Rolling upgrades and restarts have been available in services like HDFS and YARN.
This feature, which is still available in Cloudera Private Cloud Base, allows users to restart some of Cloudera’s fundamental services with reduced capacity and no downtime Diving into Zero Downtime Upgrades With that context let’s dive into how ZDU in Cloudera Private Cloud Base keeps your end users “on the bus” while performing critical maintenance.ZDU allows platform administrators to perform major upgrades, apply service packs, and cumulative hotfixes with minimum to no downtime.The first innovation of this experience was improving Cloudera Manager’s upgrade process.
The service upgrade sequence is optimized to account for service dependencies and to limit the time a service experiences reduced capacity.These optimizations improve upgrade time whether performing a regular full downtime upgrade or the ZDU experience.Next, services are improved to either add the ability to upgrade without downtime or reduce the amount of downtime one may experience. Let’s talk about what you should expect during a zero downtime upgrade.
When initiating an upgrade with Cloudera Manager, you will first be presented with a checklist page to ensure your cluster is ready for an upgrade.After completing the checklist, you can perform a regular or zero downtime upgrade.Once the ZDU begins, the Cloudera Manager will begin to upgrade the services in two stages.
First, services that will experience some downtime will be upgraded.This ensures that any service downtime is predictable and is only experienced at the beginning of your upgrade window.Next, Cloudera Manager will perform upgrades on the rest of the services that will experience reduced capacity, but zero downtime.
When Cloudera Manager completes the sequence of commands, validation of the cluster by administrators can occur much like a regular upgrade before being finalized.If any issues occur during the process, Cloudera Private Cloud Base now supports downgrades to allow a cluster to adopt the previous version without losing any metadata.The Cloudera team is passionate about helping you confidently tackle their toughest data and AI challenges.
This first step into Zero Downtime Upgrades is a big achievement in providing a revolutionary experience for cluster administration teams.Ultimately our goal is to provide you with the tools to keep the buses rolling and passengers moving so we can all make it home on time.To learn more, visit our product page.
Mark Schoeni
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