How to do get a new Firebolt version to your production engine without downtime

Why

When a new Firebolt version is released, an engine restart is required to get the newest version set. In the case of a production engine which cannot be restarted due to the involved down time (usually a few minutes, depends on the engine warmup policy), follow these steps to ensure no downtime while getting the new version to your Firebolt engine.

Steps

  1. Start a new Analytics engine with a similar spec to the engine currently used in production. Note, while the secondary Analytics engine is running, all write operations (DDL / DML) will fail.

  2. Route production traffic to the new engine:

  3. If your programmatic access to the production engine does not include specifying the engine name as an argument - route traffic to the new engine by making it the default engine of the database (hovering over the engine in the databases screen → Make Default).

  4. If your programmatic access to the production engine does include specifying the engine name as an argument - route traffic to the new engine by specifying the new engine in your connection string.

  5. Restart main production engine.

  6. Reroute traffic to main engine, and stop new engine.