Software Updates and Technical Debt

22 April 2017 · Filed in Development

I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep updated with the latest software versions. This does give us two problems however.

i) Keeping software versions and configuration updated.
Updating images and configuration can be time consuming for testers and system admins. Tools such as Puppet, Packer and ServerSpec can help here. ii) Availability of software if it’s not updated. Should a version of software contain a critical bug, it may be withdrawn from public view. I use bundles on a private S3 bucket as a solution to this.

I run servers for my clients in an immutable fashion. This means once the server is built, nothing changes on that server, for the life of the server. Disaster recovery is solid as the servers are built from scratch every day. The server is built from a base image followed by the customised software and configuration for that server’s role.

The AMI provides the Operating system and is updated regularly (like everything else) with software patches. This is then followed by the configuration and software installation. However this does give the issue of making sure all the software is available ready for a rebuild. The creation of a new server relies on the base AMI, plus any other software the build needs to create, configure and start a server running.

This week Vertica issued a critical security fix for their software which means the supported base image AMI for all but the current fixed version was withdrawn from the AWS Marketplace. This is great for customer security, but a bit of a headache as far as configuration and testing is concerned.

Had we not stayed current with the software, this would have created major rebuild issue for anyone building servers from the older AMI, as it no longer exists. The server would be unable to find its foundation building block.

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Tags: immutable · servers · software updates