Hello Colleagues!
In this blog, I have explained the Rolling Software Upgrade procedure of SAP HANA Cloud Integration. This blog is part of the architectural overview of SAP HANA Cloud Integration. You can find all the blogs over here.
Rolling software upgrades allows HANA Cloud Integration to upgrade the version of a worker node while not interrupting the message processing service. New traffic will be routed to the higher version of worker node and existing connections will not be interrupted. The cloud managed services team triggers the rolling upgrade of HANA Cloud Integration.
The following diagram helps explain the rolling upgrade procedure -
Currently, the frequency of upgrades is once-a-month. Every month, HANA Cloud Integration releases a new version with new capabilities and this is available to all the customers. Backward compatibility of the integration content is assured - that means, you do not have to check integration flows that you have developed on an older version against the latest version of the runtime.
A note on the tool-set when an upgrade is done: During every upgrade, the Web-based IDE is also upgraded. If you are using an eclipse-based toolset, then you must manually upgrade the same from the HCI Eclipse update site. You shall be notified in Eclipse if you are connecting to a higher version of the runtime.
So, the nodes are upgraded without cutting off existing message connections. You can send messages while the upgrade is going-on. No interruption of message processing services and no observable downtime for the end-users.
However, we still have the data maintenance windows for HANA cloud integration. This is for two reasons: (1) The underlying HANA cloud platform is also upgraded and (2) During upgrade, you cannot deploy new integration artifacts to the tenant. The existing integration artifacts can continue processing messages.
All tenant owners of HANA Cloud Integration shall be notified when an upgrade is done. Information on the maintenance windows depends on the location of the data centre you have chosen and is available in the contracts that you sign when purchasing HANA Cloud Integration.
So, that is how we release new versions of HANA Cloud Integration to all customers and partners every month!
Best Regards,
Sujit