The following procedure describes how to upgrade an Airlock Gateway cluster in a production environment, with minimized downtime. This may be required if it is not possible to update the Airlock Gateway installation of the nodes, e.g. if an upgrade to a new major version of Airlock Gateway requires a complete reinstallation of the nodes.
For standard update procedure, see Section – Updates.
A functional Airlock Gateway cluster consists of two different nodes, one active and one passive node. Under normal operating conditions, both nodes are online (attached to the cluster) with the active node handling the traffic and the passive node performing health checks (see drawing).
- The current working state of a node is displayed in the upper left corner of the Airlock Gateway Configuration Center and can assume:
- Active – the node is online and handling the traffic.
- Passive – the node is online and performing health checks on the active node, ready to take over the traffic if the Active node fails.
- Offline – the node is not attached to the cluster. In this state, the node is neither Active nor Passive.
If Airlock Anomaly Shield is enabled on your system, be sure to back up the ColdDB data using the Copy command before performing an Airlock Gateway system upgrade. It may be necessary to re-train the machine learning models of the upgraded Airlock gateways based on the ColdDB data. See also Release notes.
- Procedure summary:
- We will start with upgrading the passive node Bob (see Part 1), so that the traffic is handled by the active node Alice without interruption.
- After upgrading node Bob with the new Airlock Gateway release, Bob has to be synchronized (see Part 2) with the active node Alice. This prepares Bob to take over the traffic from Alice.
- In Part 3, Alice will be set offline (detached from the cluster), causing the upgraded and synchronized node Bob to take over the traffic.
- In Part 4 we upgrade node Alice and import Bob's cluster configuration.
- Finally, the cluster configuration must be applied to both updated nodes (see Part 5). After Alice is set back online, Alice enters the passive state and the full cluster functionality is restored.