Karine DilanyanAvoid downtime during private cloud upgrades. Learn strategies, pitfalls, and how Atmosphere simplifies OpenStack upgrades.
Downtime is expensive. Recent research estimates the average cost of unplanned IT downtime at $12,900 per minute (and rising), underscoring why zero-disruption upgrades matter. Every minute a service is unavailable can mean lost revenue, frustrated users, and potential SLA penalties.
For organizations running private or hybrid clouds, upgrades are a fact of life. New OpenStack releases, security patches, and infrastructure improvements keep the environment secure and performant—but the challenge is doing it without interrupting business-critical workloads.
Fortunately, solutions like Atmosphere, an open-source-based cloud management platform, make it possible to upgrade OpenStack private clouds seamlessly, ensuring users never notice a change.
Understanding the Challenge
Upgrading a private cloud is complex because it involves two major planes of operation:
- Control Plane – APIs, schedulers, and controllers that manage the cloud.
- Data Plane – The compute, storage, and networking components running the workloads.
A successful zero-downtime upgrade must maintain continuity in both planes. Database schema changes, version mismatches, and dependency conflicts can all trigger outages if not carefully planned.
Key Strategies for Zero-Downtime Upgrades
Rolling Upgrades
Instead of shutting everything down, upgrade one node at a time while workloads migrate live to other nodes.
Rolling upgrades allow you to upgrade your private cloud environment incrementally by upgrading one node at a time. During this process, workloads are dynamically live-migrated to other nodes to ensure they remain operational. This approach minimizes disruption and eliminates the need for lengthy maintenance windows.
Key Considerations During Rolling Upgrades:
Live Migration Support
Ensure that all workloads, including instances with attached block storage or GPUs, can be successfully live-migrated without downtime.
Version Compatibility
Verify that the new version being deployed is backward-compatible with the control and data plane components running on older nodes.
Service Dependencies
Ensure that interdependent services (e.g., networking and compute) remain functional during staggered upgrades.
Imagine a private cloud running a mission-critical e-commerce application during peak shopping season. A rolling upgrade allows you to update the cloud infrastructure incrementally, ensuring no downtime for payment processing or order fulfillment. Atmosphere can orchestrate live migration of workloads from an older compute node to an updated one, ensuring zero impact on customer experience.
Blue-Green Deployments
Run two parallel environments—Blue (current) and Green (upgraded). Atmosphere’s architecture supports the flexibility needed for advanced strategies like blue-green deployments, enabling organizations to redirect traffic seamlessly while validating upgrades. In short,
- Upgrade the Green environment while Blue continues serving traffic.
- Switch users to Green after validation, then decommission Blue.
- Atmosphere supports traffic redirection and automated health checks, making switchover seamless.
Canary Testing & Staged Rollouts
Imagine upgrading the networking service in a private cloud to a new version of OVN. Instead of applying the upgrade across all nodes, Atmosphere allows you to upgrade just two nodes in an isolated availability zone. During this staged rollout:
- Traffic is routed to the upgraded nodes for a small subset of users.
- Automated monitoring tracks latency, packet loss, and API error rates.
- After validating the performance and stability over 24 hours, the upgrade proceeds to the remaining nodes.
Check out our blog for challenges on OpenStack environment updates and be prepared or avoid them.
Pre-Upgrade Preparations: Laying the Foundations to Enable Seamless Upgrades
A seamless upgrade process is contingent on diligent preparation and planning. Every precaution taken before the upgrade forms the basis of success and minimizes risk.
If you’re planning a move to the latest Atmosphere release, we can even spin up a PoC environment so your team can explore the platform first. (For upgrades within your current OpenStack distribution, our experts handle the process directly to ensure a smooth transition.)
Simulate Real-World Scenarios with a Staging Environment
Make a nearly-production copy to simulate the upgrade process in an environment as close to the real environment as possible. This is done in advance, so problems are identified and resolved up front and implementation is simpler.
Establish Clear Rollback Protocols
Establish clear rollback triggers and plan automated workflows to quickly revert in case of issues. A well-documented rollback plan minimizes downtime and allows fast recovery.
Embrace Automation for Efficiency and Consistency
Take advantage of products like Ansible and Terraform in combination with robust Atmosphere APIs to automate node provisioning, validation, and configuration management. Besides minimizing the room for human error, automation allows processes to happen quickly so deployments are fast and repeatable.
Safeguard with Comprehensive Backups
Take full system snapshots and keep backups in highly available, redundant object storage. This is an important step to have a safety net in case of an unexpected failure and to preserve data integrity during the upgrade process.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- Skipping Dependency Checks
Version mismatches between services can break APIs or cause database corruption. - Inadequate Monitoring
Without strong observability—metrics, logs, and tracing—issues may go undetected until they impact users. - Unpracticed Rollback Procedures
If a rollback is required but the process hasn’t been rehearsed, downtime can balloon. - Resource Underestimation
Upgrades can temporarily spike CPU or memory usage. Lack of capacity leads to throttling and potential outages.
By addressing these pitfalls early, organizations can reduce the risk of costly surprises.
How Atmosphere Simplifies Zero-Downtime Upgrades
Atmosphere is built to make upgrades reliable and interruption-free:
- Automated Orchestration – Node-by-node upgrades with live migration of workloads.
- High Availability Architecture – Redundant controllers and services maintain continuity.
- Health Checks & Rollback – Atmosphere includes built-in health checks to monitor workloads and services during upgrades, ensuring that issues are detected early. In the event of an anomaly, automated rollback workflows ensure minimal disruption.
- Professional Services – VEXXHOST experts provide planning, compliance, and migration assistance.
Upgrade without interruptions and keep your critical workloads running smoothly with a platform designed for seamless transitions.
Conclusion: Upgrade Without Interruptions
Downtime is costly and avoidable. With careful planning, the right strategy, and automation, private cloud operators can perform even major upgrades without service interruption.
Atmosphere provides the orchestration, high availability, and expert support needed to make that goal a reality.
Ready to modernize your private cloud with zero downtime? Schedule a discovery call with our experts to learn how Atmosphere streamlines OpenStack upgrades.