Prepare to upgrade

Before you upgrade Gloo Edge, complete the following preparatory steps:

Prepare your environment

Review the following preparatory steps that might be required for your environment.

Upgrade your current minor version to the latest patch

Before you upgrade your minor version, first upgrade your current version to the latest patch. For example, if you currently run Gloo Edge Enterprise version 1.15.9, first upgrade your installation to version 1.15.10. This ensures that your current environment is up-to-date with any bug fixes or security patches before you begin the minor version upgrade process.

  1. Find the latest patch of your minor version by checking the Open Source changelog or Enterprise changelog.
  2. Go to the documentation set for your current minor version. For example, if you currently run Gloo Edge Enterprise version 1.15.9, use the drop-down menu in the header of this page to select v1.15.x.
  3. Follow the upgrade guide, using the latest patch for your minor version.

If required, perform incremental minor version updates

If you plan to upgrade to a version that is more than one minor version greater than your current version, such as to version 1.16 from 1.14 or older, you must upgrade incrementally. For example, you must first use the upgrade guide in the v1.15.x documentation set to upgrade from 1.14 to 1.15, and then follow the upgrade guide in the v1.16.x documentation set to upgrade from 1.15 to 1.16.

Upgrade dependencies

Check that your underlying infrastructure platform, such as Kubernetes, and other dependencies run a version that is supported for 1.16.

  1. Review the supported versions for dependencies such as Kubernetes, Helm, and more.
  2. Compare the supported versions against the versions you currently use.
  3. If necessary, upgrade your dependencies, such as consulting your cluster infrastructure provider to upgrade the version of Kubernetes that your cluster runs.

Consider settings to avoid downtime

You might deploy Gloo Edge in Kubernetes environments that use the Kubernetes load balancer, or in non-Kubernetes environments. Depending on your setup, you can take additional steps to avoid downtime during the upgrade process.

Review version 1.16 changes

Review the following changes made to Gloo Edge in version 1.16. For some changes, you might be required to complete additional steps during the upgrade process.

Changelogs

Check the changelogs for the type of Gloo Edge deployment that you have. Focus especially on any Breaking Changes that might require a different upgrade procedure. For Gloo Edge Enterprise, you might also review the open source changelogs because most of the proto definitions are open source.

You can use the changelogs' built-in comparison tool to compare between your current version and the version that you want to upgrade to.

Feature changes

Review the following summary of important new, deprecated, or removed features.

The following lists consist of the changes that were initially introduced with the 1.16.0 release. These changes might be backported to earlier versions of Gloo Edge. Additionally, there might be other changes that are introduced in later 1.16 patch releases. For patch release changes, check the changelogs.

New or improved features:

Helm changes

Review the following summary of important new, deprecated, or removed Helm fields. For full details, see the changelogs.

New and updated Helm fields:

CRD changes

New CRDs are automatically applied to your cluster when performing a helm install operation, but are not applied when performing an helm upgrade operation. This is a deliberate design choice on the part of the Helm maintainers, given the risk associated with changing CRDs. Given this limitation, you must apply new CRDs to the cluster before upgrading.

Review the following summary of important new, deprecated, or removed CRD updates. For full details, see the changelogs.

New and updated CRDs:

CLI changes

You must upgrade glooctl before you upgrade Gloo Edge. Because glooctl can create resources in your cluster, such as with glooctl add route, you might have errors in Gloo Edge if you create resources with an older version of glooctl.

As part of the 1.16 release, no CLI changes were introduced.

Frequently-asked questions

Review the following frequently-asked questions about the upgrade process. If you still aren’t sure about the version upgrade impact, or if your use case doesn’t quite fit the standard upgrade path, feel free to post in the #gloo or #gloo-enterprise channels of our public Slack.

How do I upgrade Gloo Edge in testing or sandbox environments?

If downtime is not a concern for your use case, you can follow the Quick upgrade guide to update your Gloo Edge installation.

Note that for sandbox or exploratory environments, the easiest way to upgrade is to uninstall Gloo Edge by running glooctl uninstall --all. Then, re-install Gloo Edge at the desired version by the following one of the installation guides.

How do I upgrade Gloo Edge in a production environment, where downtime is unacceptable?

The basic helm upgrade process is not suitable for environments in which downtime is unacceptable. Instead, you can follow the Canary upgrade guide to deploy multiple version of Gloo Edge to your cluster, and test the upgrade version before uninstalling the existing version.

Additionally, you might need to take steps to account for other factors such as Gloo Edge version changes, probe configurations, and external infrastructure like the load balancer that Gloo Edge uses. Consider setting up liveness probes and healthchecks in your environment.

What happens to my Gloo Edge CRs during an upgrade? How do I handle breaking changes?

A typical upgrade of Gloo Edge across minor versions should not cause disruptions to the existing Gloo Edge state. In the case of a breaking change, Solo will communicate through the upgrade guides, changelogs, or other channels if you must make a specific adjustment to perform the upgrade. Note that you can always use the glooctl debug yaml command to download the current Gloo Edge state to one large YAML manifest.

Is the upgrade procedure different if I am not a cluster administrator?

If you are not an administrator of your cluster, you might be unable to create custom resource definitions (CRDs) and other cluster-scoped resources, such as cluster roles and cluster role bindings. If you encounter an error related to these resources, you can disable their creation by including the following setting in your Helm values:

global:
  glooRbac:
    create: false

Otherwise, you can try performing an installation of Gloo Edge that is scoped to a single namespace by including the following setting in your Helm values:

global:
  glooRbac:
    namespaced: true

Why do I get an error about re-creating CRDs when upgrading using helm install or helm upgrade?

Helm v2 does not manage CRDs well, and is not supported in Gloo Edge. Upgrade to Helm v3, delete the CRDs, and try again.

Why do I get an error about a gateway-certgen job?

The upgrade creates a Kubernetes Job named gateway-certgen to generate a certificate for the validation webhook. The job contains the ttlSecondsAfterFinished value so that the cluster cleans up the job automatically, but because this setting is still in Alpha, your cluster might ignore this value. In this case, you might have an issue while upgrading in which the upgrade attempts to change the gateway-certgen job, but the change fails because the job is immutable. To fix this issue, you can delete the job, which already completed, and re-apply the upgrade.