HDP Upgrade Best Practices - 3) Documentation and Learnings

[#1]

Documentation

It is recommended to create the following documents as part of the Upgrade Planning and Execution phase.

● Upgrade plan

● Upgrade guide

● Upgrade log (list of issues and their workarounds)

● Validation test results

● Hand-over documents

Learnings from the Field

Phased approach to Upgrades

● Upgrade Dev/Test cluster first before touching production environment. This will catch issues which are specific to the environments.

● Upgrade Dev/Test cluster first, create a runbook along with all issues which occurred during upgrade

●Just setting up fresh cluster with the new version in Dev and testing applications is not enough. While it does take care of application tests, upgrade issues are not tested. It is recommended to upgrade Dev/Test in line with upgrade path for Production.

Updating Configurations

● Any major update to the configurations should be designed and tested in advance.

● For example – Capacity Scheduler

●Recommend to prepare for capacity scheduler if you are not using so as part of upgrade planning. It should have been tested on Dev.

●Create and define Capacity Scheduler queues before upgrade. Allocate time and do this before the scheduled upgrade.

**See Also**

HDP Upgrade Best Practices - 1) Plan and Asses

HDP Upgrade Best Practices - 2) Do the Upgrade

[#2]

@Eyad Garelnabi: There is a document called "Ambari Upgrade Best Practices," http://docs.hortonworks.com/HDPDocuments/HDP2/HDP-2.5.3/bk_ambari-upgrade-best-practices/content/ind..., that was developed with folks in the field, and the issues that many of our customers face. It's a relatively new document, and I hope you will find it useful.