Upgrade Steps

Upgrade your Gloo Edge Enterprise or Gloo Edge Open Source installations, such as from one minor version to the latest version.

The general upgrade process involves preparing to upgrade and then upgrading two main components, the glooctl CLI and the gloo components that are deployed in your cluster.

1. Prepare to upgrade.
   1. Review the version changelogs.
   2. Enterprise-only: Understand the open source dependencies.
   3. Consider settings to avoid downtime.
2. Upgrade glooctl.
3. Apply any minor version-specific changes, like adding and removing CRDs.
4. Upgrade the Gloo Edge server components via Helm.

Step 1: Prepare to upgrade

Prepare to upgrade by reviewing information about the version, dependencies, and deployment environment.

Familiarize yourself with information about the version that you want to upgrade to.

1. Make sure you understand the Changelog entry types.
2. 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. For more information, see the following enterprise-only section on understanding the open source dependencies.
   • Open source changelogs
   • Enterprise changelogs
3. If you plan to upgrade to a version that is more than one minor version greater than your current version, such as to version 1.13 from 1.11 or older, you must upgrade incrementally. For example, you must first upgrade from 1.11 to 1.12, and then upgrade from 1.12 to 1.13.
4. Review the version-specific upgrade docs.
   • 1.13.0+
   • 1.12.0+
   • 1.11.0+
   • 1.10.0+
5. If you still aren’t sure about the version upgrade impact, scan our Frequently-asked questions. Also, feel free to post in the #gloo or #gloo-enterprise channels of our public Slack if your use case doesn’t quite fit the standard upgrade path.

Enterprise-only: Understand the open source dependencies.

Keep in mind that Gloo Edge Enterprise pulls in Gloo Edge Open Source as a dependency. Although the major and minor version numbers are the same for open source and enterprise, their patch versions often differ. For example, open source might use version x.y.a but enterprise uses version x.y.b. Because of the differing patch versions, you might notice different output when checking your version with glooctl version. If you are unfamiliar with these versioning concepts, see Semantic versioning.

Example of differing open source and enterprise versions for Gloo Edge:

~ > glooctl version
Client: {"version":"1.13.4"}
Server: {"type":"Gateway","enterprise":true,"kubernetes":...,{"Tag":"1.13.4","Name":"grpcserver-ee","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},...,{"Tag":"1.13.4","Name":"discovery","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},...}

# The API server runs the Gloo Edge Enterprise version 1.13.4,
# which pulls in Gloo Edge Open Source version 1.13.4 as a dependency.

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.

• Kubernetes: Enable Envoy readiness and liveness probes during the upgrade. When these probes are set, Kubernetes sends requests only to the healthy Envoy proxy during the upgrade process, which helps to prevent potential downtime. The probes are not enabled in default installations because they can lead to timeouts or other poor getting started experiences.
• Non-Kubernetes: Configure health checks on Envoy. Then, configure your load balancer to leverage these health checks, so that requests stop going to Envoy when it begins draining connections.

Step 2: Upgrade glooctl

Install or upgrade glooctl. When you upgrade, specify the Gloo Edge OSS version that corresponds to the Gloo Edge Enterprise version you want to upgrade to. To find the OSS version that corresponds to each Gloo Edge Enterprise release, see the Gloo Edge Enterprise changelogs.

You can upgrade glooctl in the following ways:

• Use glooctl upgrade
• Download a glooctl release

glooctl upgrade

You can use the glooctl upgrade command to download the latest binary. For more options, run glooctl upgrade --help. For example, you might use the --release flag, which can be useful to control which version you run.

1. Review the client and server versions of glooctl.

   glooctl version
   

   Example output: Notice that the the client version is the same as the server components.

   Client: {"version":"1.12.42"}
   Server: {"type":"Gateway","kubernetes":{"containers":[{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"discovery","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"gateway","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"gloo-envoy-wrapper","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"gloo","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"}],"namespace":"gloo-system"}}
   

2. Upgrade your version of glooctl.

   glooctl upgrade --release v1.13.4
   

   Example output:

   downloading glooctl-darwin-amd64 from release tag v1.13.4
   successfully downloaded and installed glooctl version v1.13.4 to /usr/local/bin/glooctl
   

3. Confirm that the version is upgraded.

   glooctl version
   

   Example output: Notice that the client version is now 1.13.4.

   Client: {"version":"1.13.4"}
   Server: {"type":"Gateway","kubernetes":{"containers":[{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"discovery","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"gateway","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"gloo-envoy-wrapper","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"},{"Tag":"1.12.42","Name":"gloo","Registry":"quay.io/solo-io"}],"namespace":"gloo-system"}}
   

4. Check that your Gloo Edge components are OK. If glooctl check reports a problem, Gloo Edge might not work properly or Envoy might not get the updated configuration.

   glooctl check
   

   Example output:

   Checking deployments... OK
   Checking pods... OK
   Checking upstreams... OK
   Checking upstream groups... OK
   Checking secrets... OK
   Checking virtual services... OK
   Checking gateways... OK
   Checking proxies... OK
   No problems detected.
   

Download a glooctl release

1. In your browser, navigate to the Gloo project releases.
2. Click on the version of glooctl that you want to install.
3. In the Assets, download the glooctl package that matches your operating system, and follow your operating system procedures for replacing your existing glooctl binary file with the upgraded version.

Step 3: Apply minor version-specific changes

Each minor version might add custom resource definitions (CRDs) that Helm upgrades cannot handle seamlessly. Review the minor version-specific upgrading docs, which might include steps for installing new CRDs and removing outdated CRDs.

• 1.13.0+
• 1.12.0+
• 1.11.0+
• 1.10.0+

Step 4: Upgrade Gloo Edge

The following example upgrade process assumes that Gloo Edge is installed with Helm in a Kubernetes cluster and uses the Kubernetes load balancer.

Helm upgrades for Gloo Edge Enterprise

The process to upgrade Gloo Edge Enterprise is similar to Gloo Edge Open Source. However, you also need to set your license key during the upgrade by using the --set license_key="$license" flag (or include the line license_key: $LICENSE-KEY in your values file).

If you do not have a license key, Request a Gloo Edge Enterprise trial.

Upgrade steps

The following steps assume that you already installed Gloo Edge as a Helm release in the gloo-system namespace, and have set the Kubernetes context to the cluster.

1. Upgrade the Helm release.

   • Gloo Edge Open Source example:

     helm repo update
     helm upgrade -n gloo-system gloo gloo/gloo --version=v1.13.4
     

     Example output:

     Release "gloo" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
     NAME: gloo
     LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Dec 12 12:22:16 2019
     NAMESPACE: gloo-system
     STATUS: deployed
     REVISION: 2
     TEST SUITE: None
     

   • Gloo Edge Enterprise example:

     helm repo update
     helm upgrade -n gloo-system gloo glooe/gloo-ee --version=v1.13.4
     

     Example output:

     Release "glooe" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
     NAME: glooe
     LAST DEPLOYED: Thu Dec 12 12:22:16 2019
     NAMESPACE: gloo-system
     STATUS: deployed
     REVISION: 2
     TEST SUITE: None
     

2. Verify that Gloo Edge runs the upgraded version.

   kubectl -n gloo-system get pod -l gloo=gloo -ojsonpath='{.items[0].spec.containers[0].image}'
   

   Example output:

   quay.io/solo-io/gloo:1.13.4
   

3. Verify that all server components run the upgraded version.

   glooctl version
   

4. Check that your Gloo Edge components are OK. If a problem is reported by glooctl check, Gloo Edge might not work properly or Envoy might not get the updated configuration.

   glooctl check
   

   Example output:

   Checking deployments... OK
   Checking pods... OK
   Checking upstreams... OK
   Checking upstream groups... OK
   Checking secrets... OK
   Checking virtual services... OK
   Checking gateways... OK
   Checking proxies... OK
   No problems detected.