Always Look before you Jump!

System's infrastructure plays a key role in overall system's performance. Firmware versions as well as OS version of the infrastructure must be tested against the service components that are used in developing the applications that would eventually run on the infrastructure. For public cloud service consumer, this will make little or no sense to you, unless you're consuming a dedicated server as a service.

Whatever platform you're using to run your applications, be it virtual environments like VMs, containerized environments or even baremetal environments, it is crucial to test the applications against the target firmware, OS versions before upgrading the infrastructure layer. The result is that if this is not done, the target firmware versions may not be very compatible with the application's service components and this will in turn either degrade the applications' performance or even break the applications. It's easier to rollback application upgrade but it's not the same for infrastructure.

I have always loved been on system's latest version. I do not hesitate upgrading my lab whenever there is new release until I learned the hard way.

I finally understand why some organizations are three to four versions behind latest release. Although I feel four versions behind is too much but I understand why. I have a lab that runs on Ubuntu. The lab was a Kubernetes cluster I had created based on this git repository.

I loved the repository because it made my life easy. I would spin up a 3 control plane Kubernetes HA cluster with just one command. I destroy and create the lab any time I wanted because all it took was just one command, Ansible took care of the rest.

I got notification for new updates and before I knew it I was already executed sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y on the cli. The upgrade broke my lab completely. It was there and then I understood why rushing to be on latest release is not as easy as I thought it was. Having a test lab is a good way to avoid this kind of situation. The lab is upgraded and tested. Usually, the test environment is a clone of production environment. When there is release, it's also important to read the release notes to know what has changed and what has not changed.