Take a fail-fast approach for developing RHEL upgrade automation

Take a fail-fast approach for developing RHEL upgrade automation The challenge The solution 1. Automate Everything 2. Snapshot with rollback 3. Custom Modules 4. Reporting dashboard (optional, but VERY useful) Lessons learned from automating a million RHEL in-place upgrades Learn more about RHEL upgrades We're here to help Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform | Product Trial About the authors Bob Mader Bob Handlin More like this Blog post Blog post Original podcast Original podcast Keep exploring Browse by channel Automation Artificial intelligence Open hybrid cloud Security Edge computing Infrastructure Applications Virtualization Share It's been just over two years since we wrote about automating in-place upgrades for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). During that time, we've seen dozens of customers upgrade hundreds of thousands of systems using our prescriptive, automated approach to make RHEL upgrades happen at scale. In this article, we’ll do a quick review of the key features that help accelerate the roll out of RHEL upgrade automation. We’ll look at what’s worked well, but also at some of the challenges and lessons learned. The key learning: Fail fast, iterate, and try again. The most important thing this accomplishes is making the upgrade process less scary, allowing quick recovery to the original state when things don't go perfectly right away. Many of our biggest customers have large RHEL environments that have grown and evolved through the decades since enterprise adoption of Linux took off in the early 2000s. Organizations have tried to virtualize and containerize with the best intentions of modernizing how they deploy and manage application workloads, but some still have vast numbers of RHEL hosts that haven't caught up.