Is it possible to upgrade a JIRA installation in place without interrupting service?

[Saul Perdomo]

Hello Atlassian,

Due to the fact that many of our clients and offshore offices are spread out across the world in various timezones, our CTO is interested in performing JIRA upgrades without the need to interrupt the service (however briefly). I have searched your documents but have not found any references to this possibility -- according to the official, supported method the service is shut down for the duration of the upgrade.

Please point me to the right documentation, or let me know if there is a way to do this. Our thinking is that you probably upgrade your own support JIRA instance in some sort of uninterrupted manner.

Thank you,

Saul Perdomo

[JamieA · Accepted solution]

No, it's not (realistically) possible, and no, Atlassian do bring their services down to upgrade them. There are lots of tricks to minimise the downtime, but you can't avoid it. Regarding your timezones, typically you would schedule this work for the weekend.

[Saul Perdomo]

Thanks for your reply, Jamie. Can you please elaborate on the technical reasons why it's not realistically possible? Our COO is involved in this request and he can be very persistent -- in his view, we should be targeting 0% downtime due to the fact that we provide 24x7 support for our product through JIRA and Confluence.

[Radu Dumitriu]

Please read this: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATLAS/Failover+for+JIRA

Once you understand it, you can use it to minimize your down-time, if you think it is worthing to have a cold instance of Jira (but you will need to revert the data replication twice).

Jira is not a clusterizable web application (yet!)

[Saul Perdomo]

Thanks for your input, Radu. We actually have a (cold) standby application server currently in place, and in lieu of a replicated DB we have set up postgres write-ahead log archiving to a remote location. This is to say we are aware of the concept and the document you have linked, however our current inquiry is not how do we minimize the upgrade downtime -- we are interested in eliminating it completely.

I would appreciate it if you could expand on what you mean when you say JIRA is not *yet* a clusterizable web app. What are the plans for the future?

[Radu Dumitriu]

You cannot, as Jamie said. The clusterization of Jira would eliminate completely such downtime. The plans to do that are still foggy: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-7330

[Theinvisibleman]

Hi Saul,

This is because during the upgrade, the database tables and schemas will be updated, and possibly changed. There will also be updates to the bundled plugins, and the classes that are used by JIRA.

Hence, in order for these changes to take place smoothly, JIRA would have to be down, so as to not have anything interrupt the upgrade process.

Cheers,

Joe

[Saul Perdomo]

Thank you to those who took the time to respond. Our takeaway here is that the answer is "no" -- no uninterrupted upgrade is currently available nor in the works.

We realize there are technical hurdles to be overcome, the question that remains for Atlassian is whether they want to invest the resources to achieve this. We'd be surprised to learn that we are the only client interested in this. If any decision makers are listening, please take this away as a discussion point for your next project planning meeting.