How to move to a new version of private cloud while keeping the original version running

[kkalckstein]

I have a customer who wants to upgrade the existing 15.07 private cloud installation to 16.01. However, they want to minimize risk and downtime so want to bring up a new environment with the new version while the old one remains on the old version, and then switch traffic to the new environment.

I have suggested to setup 15.07 in the new environment, back up the old env, and restore Cassandra, postgres and LDAP to in the new environment, and then upgrade to 16.01 in the new environment.

The problem with this approach is that the backup/restore of Cassandra will take some time during which the environment would become unavailable.

To address this, the question is if the cassandra nodes in both environments could be combined for the time it takes to get the new environment upgraded.

If anyone has tried something like this, i.e. add additional Cassandra nodes, and later split them off, and use them in a different Apigee environment, it would be great if they could share the steps that were taken to do so.

[#2]

This is a data migration scenario. A new planet will need to be installed with the new version and data from old planet will need to be migrated to the new one.

My recommendation will be to upgrade in place. Meaning certify the upgrade process and proxies on non-prod and once ready, apply the same process in production. Edge can be upgraded with zero downtime.

If customer wants to go with data migration path, they could move system/users generated data from old Org (old planet) to new Org (new planet) using the migration tool:

https://github.com/apigeecs/apigee-migrate-tool