Update in production

How to update a challenge scenario once it is in production (instances are deployed) ?
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So you have a challenge that made its way to production, but it contains a bug or an unexpected solve ? Yes, we understand your pain: you would like to patch this but expect services interruption… It is not a problem anymore !

A common worklow of a challenge fix happening in production.

We adopted the reflexions of The Update Framework to provide infrastructure update mecanisms with different properties.

What to do

You will have to update the scenario, of course. Once it is fixed and validated, archive the new version.

Then, you’ll have to pick up an Update Strategy.

Update Strategy Require Robustness¹ Time efficiency Cost efficiency Availability TL;DR;
Update in place ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ Efficient in time & cost ; require high maturity
Blue-Green ❌ ✅ ❌ ✅ Efficient in time ; costfull
Recreate ❌ ❌ ✅ ❌ Efficient in cost ; time consuming

¹ Robustness of both the provider and resources updates.

More information on the selection of those models and how they work internally is available in the design documentation.

You’ll only have to update the challenge, specifying the Update Strategy of your choice. Chall-Manager will temporarily block operations on this challenge, and update all existing instances. This makes the process predictible and reproductible, thus you can test in a pre-production environment before production. It also avoids human errors during fix, and lower the burden at scale.