Update hell

One of our major sites requires some components that were essentially invented about a year ago and I prefer to install things via package.  In the spirit of getting going with it, I requested that our data center team installs a few packages on the existing platform not thinking much about it.

Well… I guess I should have thought more about it.  They decided to upgrade all of the packages on the server; about 400 in total.  Every library and every component shot forward in time about 6 years.

PEACFUL

The platform itself runs well and has been stable for quite some time; now all of a sudden strange things started happening.  We had to decide if we wanted to try to downgrade the libraries or stay the course and upgrade our software to work with the updates.  We chose the latter.

In the course of two days, we touched thousands of lines of code and pushed everything up to a newer version.  Fortunately we have been anticipating the need to upgrade and a lot of the pieces were in place.  It was a bit tricky as we had to maintain linkage between our dev and production sites so that we don’t ‘upgrade’ the software in the future and wipe out the site and yet still maintain the major release that we have been developing for about 7 months.

I’m happy to say that the entire day went by and we didn’t hear anything is wrong.  The logs look clear and sales are continuing to go up.  Phew… I’m glad I don’t have to do that again!

~JCF