Studio Conductor Upgrade Manager

Introduction

The Studio Conductor Upgrade Manager is a CLI application aimed at helping upgrade Wind River Conductor to a new release.

Features

• Automates multiple upgrade stages like data backup, data migration, Helm upgrade, rollbacks, and other similar tasks.
• Dynamically transitions between stages.
• Gracefully handles rollbacks.
• Provides detailed logs of the process (found under /tmp/conductor_upgrade_manager/).

Requirements

• Python version: 3.11
• Operating System: Any modern Linux distro
• The host must have Kubectl, Helm and the Conductor CLI installed and access to the target cluster.

Remote connection to WRCP Host

Conductor CLI Access

To use the Conductor CLI refer to Connect to a remote manager. The manager hostname, URL or IP must be the one configured for WRC at the WRCP host.

Managing Kubernetes & Helm

To manage Kubernetes remotely, the system administrator must set up the system and create users and groups with access to the the cluster. The procedure to set up the system and create users in a WRCP system can be found in WRCP’s documentation under User Management > Reference Material > LDAP Accounts > Kubernetes API User Authentication Using LDAP Server > Overview of LDAP Servers.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter issues:

• Verify the cluster connection:

kubectl get pods -n wrc

• Check network access:

curl -k https://<oam-ip>:6443/healthz

WRCP Plugin Artifacts

The Conductor Upgrade Manager will automatically update the WRCP-Plugin. The archive must follow the structure below and it has to be present in current working directory where user will run upgrade command:

wrcp-plugin-artifacts.tar

• wrcp-plugin-artifacts/
  • blueprint.yaml (mandatory)
  • plugin.yaml (mandatory)
  • any_filename.wgn (any filename, mandatory file)

If the above structure is not present, the Conductor Upgrade Manager will not upgrade the plugin, blueprint, and deployments.

Stages

The upgrade process consists of multiple stages, each handling a specific part of the operation. Users can choose to start or resume the process from a particular stage as needed.

• Precheck: Checks system requirements before starting the upgrade process.
• BackupWRCResources: Backs up Conductor resources to a local directory.
• BackupK8sResources: Backs up custom resources in JSON format.
• DownloadImages: Downloads required Conductor images.
• ExtractCRDs: Extracts CRDs from the Helm package and copies them to the appropriate directory for the upgrade script.
• UpgradeWRCPods: Upgrades core pods to the target version.
• UpgradeDeployment: Upgrades the existing deployments to target version
• UpgradeCRDs: Upgrades CRDs to the target version.
• UpgradeCRs: Upgrades CRs to the target version.
• RollbackWRC: Rolls back all Conductor pods to the original version.
• RollbackCRs: Rolls back CRs to their original version.
• Postcheck: Verifies system status after completing the upgrade process.

CLI Arguments

Mandatory Arguments

• --namespace: Specifies the namespace to perform the upgrade.
• --release-name: Specifies the release name.
• --charts-path: Specifies the charts path. Must be a valid path.
• --overrides-path: Specifies the overrides path. Must be a valid path.

Optional Arguments

• --loglevel: Specifies which messages get logged during execution. Options include “DEBUG”, “INFO”, “WARNING”, “ERROR” and “CRITICAL”. Defaults to “INFO”.
• --wrc-backup-path: Specifies the WRC backup path. Must be an accessible directory. Defaults to the project’s temporary directory.
• --max-retries: Specifies the maximum number of retries before considering the execution of a stage action as failed. Defaults to 10 retry attempts. Set to 0 to disable.
• --retry-delay: Specifies the delay in seconds between each retry attempt. Defaults to 60 seconds.
• --max-timeout: Specifies the maximum timeout in seconds before considering the execution of a stage action as failed. Defaults to 30 seconds.
• --stage-debug: Specifies the stage to run. Defaults to running all stages.
• --start-from: Specifies the stage to start the upgrade from. Defaults to running all stages.
• --stop-on-cr-failure: Stops on the Custom Resource upgrade in case of failures.
• --disable-rollback: Disables rollbacks.
• --clean-tmp: Cleans temporary files from previous executions before proceeding with the upgrade.
• --help: Displays the help files for the argument.

Procedure

To start an upgrade process, simply call “wrc-upgrade” with the corresponding CLI arguments:

wrc-upgrade --namespace=my-namespace --release-name=my-release --charts-path=wind-river-conductor-25.3.0.tgz --overrides-path=override-values-2503.yaml

Additionally, you can also choose to run a specific stage passing its name via the –stage CLI argument. While this is not generally recommended, it can be useful in some situations like when you just want to create a backup.

Execution Flow

The Conductor Upgrade Manager is organised into several stages that are called in series as the upgrade process advances. In the case of an error, the rollback stages are then called to undo the transient changes and return to the original state.

For simplicity, all individual stages in the upgrade and rollback processes have been grouped into single “Upgrade” and “Rollback” blocks, respectively.