Upgrading PGD clusters with TPA v5

No Postgres major version upgrades

TPA doesn't currently support major version upgrades of Postgres. The techniques outlined here can perform minor version upgrades of the PGD software and minor version upgrades of Postgres. To perform a major version upgrade of Postgres, see In-place Postgres major version upgrades.

If you used TPA to install your cluster, you can also use TPA to upgrade your cluster. You can read more, in detail, about the capabilities of TPA upgrades in Upgrading your cluster in the TPA documentation.

Always test first

If possible, always test upgrade processes in a QA environment first to ensure there are no unexpected factors to be taken into account. TPA's ability to reproducibly deploy a PGD configuration makes it much easier to build a test environment to work with.

Minor and major PGD upgrades

Minor version upgrades of PGD are managed automatically

Major version upgrades of PGD will require changes to the TPA config.yml file which contains the deployment configuration.

If you are upgrading to PGD 5, from previous PGD major versions, you will be able to use tpaexec reconfigure to help you make appropriate modifications to your deployment configuration.

The reconfigure command will require settings for architecture (only PGD_Always_ON and PGD Proxy routing to run. Remember to back up your deployment configuration before running, and use the --describe and --output options to preview the reconfiguration.

Pre-requisites

  • The cluster configuration directory that was created when TPA deployed your PGD cluster.

  • If performing a major version upgrade of PGD, ensure that tpaexec reconfigure has been run and appropriate configuration changes have been made.

Upgrading

Run

tpaexec upgrade clustername

Where clustername is the name of the cluster and the path to the cluster configuration directory. By default, TPA will upgrade each node of the cluster to the latest minor versions of the software the nodes were configured with.

TPA's automated rolling upgrade procedure

TPA will test first the cluster then the nodes. Each node will then be isolated from the cluster, upgraded and then returned to operation within the cluster.

  • Checks that all preconditions for upgrading the cluster are met.
  • For each instance in the cluster, checks that it has the correct repositories configured and that the required postgres packages are available in them.
    • For each BDR node in the cluster, one at a time:
      • Fences the node off to ensure that pgd-proxy doesn't send any connections to it.
      • Stops, updates, and restarts postgres.
      • Unfences the node so it can receive connections again.
      • Updates pgbouncer, pgd-proxy, and pgd-cli, as applicable for this node.