Delayed Switch: Cloud service upgrade with low availability and capacity loss

Cloud services must upgrade continuously in order to maintain competitive. However, a large body of empirical evidence suggests that, upgrade procedures used in practice are failure-prone and often cause planned or unplanned downtime. In this paper, we first define what is cloud service online upgrade, and then we analyze the shortcomings of current mainstream cloud service online upgrade mechanisms. In particular, the mixed version problem along with rolling upgrade and the capacity loss problem brought by split mode upgrade have been discussed. After that, we propose a solution called Delayed Switch, which can conduct cloud service upgrade with lower loss of availability and capacity in contrast with existing approaches. We prove the performance of delayed switch in theory and develop a prototype system applying this method. And by conducting experiments with a typical e-commerce service named Rubis, we validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.