Re: Fast rolling-updates on Google Compute Engine (GCE) instances?

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 7 Nov 2022, at 20:12, Kate D <kit-ty-kate@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> I found a blog post by Sean Grove 
> (https://www.riseos.com/blog/2016/09/13/continuously-deploying-mirage-unikernels-to-google-compute-engine-using-circle-ci.html)
>  talking about agcloud alpha compute rolling-updates ​command which 
> supposedly is a zero-downtime way of doing that, but the blog-post is 
> unfinished and the command itself doesn't seem to work anymore.
> Other online resources do talk about this command but the way to make it work 
> is never clear.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience with rolling updates in GCE by any chance?

If I remember right (and this is going back a few years to when Sean first 
wrote that post), the rolling-updates feature never made it out of alpha status 
on GCE.  I had to apply for an allowlist on my account to enable it (or a 
closely related feature) when I was experimenting with it.

I’ve not tried it recently, but GCE instance-groups are probably the mechanism 
by which you activate zero-downtime upgrades now.

Anil