Skip to main content

This is for internal use by the PaaS team. Public-facing documentation is located at docs.cloud.service.gov.uk.

Upgrading BOSH

You can find new releases of BOSH in the BOSH repository. Once you have decided on which version to use, carry out the following steps:

  1. In cloudfoundry/bosh-deployment, identify the commit that uses the version of BOSH you want to upgrade to. You can do this by checking the releases in the bosh.yml. For example, the following snippet from bosh.yml uses version 273.1.0 of BOSH:

    - name: bosh
sha1: f9f7d13df4384c0562e1fd31431053d705326f64
url: https://s3.amazonaws.com/bosh-compiled-release-tarballs/bosh-273.1.0-ubuntu-jammy-1.8-20220822-191956-046681798-20220822191957.tgz
version: 273.1.0

    The corresponding commit is 959ed4a6a9b2739be14dd37b1ff45626892215af.

  2. Update the submodule upstream in alphagov/paas-bootstrap/manifests/bosh-manifest to point to the commit identified in the previous step.

  3. Determine if you need to make any other changes to ops files, based on the release changes.

Testing the upgrade

You should test the changes in a development environment by doing the following:

  1. Claim one of the team development environments (dev01, dev02 or dev03) by sending a message to the #paas-internal channel on GDS Slack, tagging @paas-devs.

  2. Make sure the current branch of paas-bootstrap deployed by the create-bosh-concourse pipeline to the environment is main and has been run with the latest commit. If not, do it yourself:

    gds aws paas-dev-admin -- make dev01 deployer-concourse pipelines BRANCH=main

  3. Pause the create-cloudfoundry pipeline in the dev environment.

  4. Update the create-bosh-concourse pipeline to deploy your paas-bootstrap branch to the dev environment. You can update it by running:

    gds aws paas-dev-admin -- make dev01 deployer-concourse pipelines BRANCH=UPGRADE_BRANCH_NAME

    where UPGRADE_BRANCH_NAME is the name of the branch you created for the upgrade.

  5. The concourse-deploy job may fail because Concourse rolls itself. If this happens, you will need to trigger a new build for the concourse-deploy job.

  6. When the create-bosh-concourse pipeline finishes, run the create-cloudfoundry pipeline. Make sure you use the main branch of paas-cf.

Checking credential rotation

Carry out the following steps to make sure our process for rotating credentials continues to work:

  1. Run the test-certificate-rotation Concourse pipeline.
  2. Rotate the BOSH credentials and certificates.
  3. Rotate the broker credentials.

Merging the upgrade

If the previous steps succeed, you can open a PR for review. Once it has been approved, do the following:

  1. Tell people you will be upgrading BOSH and pausing the create-cloudfoundry pipelines by sending a message to the #paas-internal channel on GDS Slack, tagging @paas-devs.

  2. Make sure nothing is being deployed and pause the create-cloudfoundry pipeline in staging, prod and prod-lon. You can do this by pausing the pipeline-lock job for each environment in Concourse.

  3. Merge-sign the PR. The gds-cli has a useful utility for this:

    gds git merge-sign alphagov/paas-cf <PR_NUMBER>

  4. Trigger the create-bosh-concourse pipeline in staging. You can do this by triggering a new build of the init-bucket job in Concourse. When it finishes, do the same for the prod and prod-lon pipelines.

  5. Unpause all the create-cloudfoundry pipelines.