Prepare to Upgrade Verrazzano

A Verrazzano installation consists of a stack of components, such as cert-manager, where each component has a specific release version that may be different from the overall Verrazzano version. The Verrazzano platform operator knows the versions of each component associated with the Verrazzano version. When you perform the initial Verrazzano installation, the appropriate version of each component is installed by the platform operator. Post installation, it may be necessary to update one or more of the component images or Helm charts. This update is also handled by the platform operator and is called an upgrade. Currently, Verrazzano does only patch-level upgrades, where a helm upgrade command can be issued for the component. Typically, patch-level upgrades simply replace component images with newer versions.

Application and system pod restarts

If Verrazzano has a new version of Istio, then all the pods with Istio proxy sidecars need to be restarted. This is done so that the new version of the proxy sidecar can be injected into the pods. All Verrazzano pods containing Istio proxy sidecars will be restarted. This includes Verrazzano system pods, such as the NGINX Ingress Controller, along with Verrazzano applications. For WebLogic workloads, Verrazzano will shut down every domain, do the upgrade, then restart every domain. For all other workloads, Verrazzano will perform a rolling restart when the upgrade has completed. There is no user involvement related to restarting applications; it is done automatically during upgrade.