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Machine Translation Report
What is the optimal MT Engine for you? Find out in the latest MT Report by Memsource.
Upgrading software to a new version can bring lots of improvements, but at the same time can cause disruption to its users. In the pre-cloud era, a system administrator would need to install the upgrade. The software would need to be at least restarted. Sometimes data would need to be migrated, hardware re-configured. All sorts of issues could come up. For that reason, software publishers would try to minimize the number of new releases to just a few per year. This is still true for most non-cloud software.
A cloud setup makes it possible to remove most of these drawbacks. For this reason, users of a cloud-based software product will typically get upgrades much more often. At Memsource, we typically deploy 2 minor releases per day and a major new release once a month. Our minor deployments include bug fixes and minor features. The major deployments include major new features.
Our daily minor deployments cause no disruption to Memsource users: Memsource is available without interruption and users are not even logged out. This used to be different for our major deployments that would take place once a month on Sundays: Our users understood that, in exchange for the new features, Memsource would not be available for a limited period of time (30-60 minutes) once a month.
However, it has been our goal for some time to deploy our major monthly releases without any service interruption. And we have recently succeeded: Our latest release, Memsource Cloud 5.4, has been deployed without any downtime. Users may have just noticed periods of increased network latency.
So how did we do it? The idea sounds simple: Each and every server, one by one, is removed from the cloud production environment, upgraded to a newer version and then inserted back.
The difficulty starts with the realization that, for a certain period of time, one part of the infrastructure runs an older version and the rest runs a newer version. Without the right precautions, incompatibilities between the two parts may undermine the whole process.
Preparations for a zero-downtime deployment of our latest version actually started immediately after the release of our previous version, Memsouce Cloud 5.3, over a month ago. From that point on, we had to make sure that every new feature, change or bug fix was going to be implemented in a backwards-compatible way at multiple levels – from the database, through internal service communication, all the way up to the user interface.
A few days before the deployment, long-running DB operations were initiated to update the tables and relations to the expectations of the new version. Finally, after all the preparations, it took us less than an hour to seamlessly bring you all the new and exciting features of Memsource Cloud 5.4.
And guess what? We plan to deploy our next major release with zero-downtime too. Keep your fingers crossed for us…
