I am using unattended-upgrades across multiple servers. I would like package updates to be rolled out gradually, either randomly or to a subset of test/staging machines first. Is there a way to do that for APT on Ubuntu?
An obvious option is to set some machines to update on Monday and the others to update on Wednesday, but that only gives me only weekly updates…
The goal of course is to avoid a Crowdstrike-like situation on my Ubuntu machines.
edit: For example. An updated openssh-server comes out. One fifth of the machines updates that day, another fifth updates the next day, and the rest updates 3 days later.
It’s called a staging environment. You have servers you apply changes to first before going to production.
I assume you mean this for home though, so take a small number of your machines and have them run unattended upgrades daily, and set whatever you’re worried about to only run them every few weeks or something.
Duder… c’mon: https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
Is there anything about staggered upgrades and staging environments in there? Because obviously I had read it before posting…
In an ideal world, there should be 3 separated environments of the same app/service:
devel → staging → production.
Devel = playground, stagging = near identical to the production.
So you can test the updates before fixing production.
So you can test the updates before fixing production.
My question is how to do that with APT.
I think there is no a out-of-the-box solution.
You can run security updates manually, but it’s too much to do.
Try to host apt mirrors in different stages, with unattended-updates tuned on.
Devel will have the latest.
Staging the latest positively tested on the devel.
Production the latest positively tested on the staging.
Making multiple mirrors seems like the best solution. I will explore that route.
I was hoping there was something built into APT or unattended-upgrades, I vaguely remembered such a feature… what I was remembering was probably Phased Updates, but those are controlled by Ubuntu not by me, and roll out too fast.
Ubuntu only does security updates, no? So that seems like a bad idea.
If you still want to do that, I guess you’d probably need to run your own package mirror, update that on Monday, and then point all the machines to use that in the sources.list and run unattended-upgrades on different days of the week.
Ubuntu only does security updates, no?
No, why do you think that?
run your own package mirror
I think you might be on to something here. I could probably do this with a package mirror, updating it daily and rotating the staging, production, etc URLs to serve content as old as I want. This would require a bit of scripting but seems very configurable.
Thanks for the idea! Can’t believe I didn’t think of that. It seems so obvious now, I wonder if someone already made it.
Yes, Ubuntu DOES only do security updates. They don’t phase major versions of point releases into distro release channels after they have been released. You have no idea what you are talking about in this thread. You need to go do some reading, please. People are trying to help you, and you’re just responding by being rude and snarky. The worst snark as well, because you think you are informed and right, and you’re just embarrassing yourself and annoying the people trying to help you.
Go away. You’re here pretending that Ubuntu only does security updates. You have never received a bugfix from Ubuntu? And I am the one who doesn’t know what he’s talking about?
Why do you insert yourself into conversations with other people? I am the one who’s rude?
Maybe you could switch to an image based distro which is easy to roll back and won’t boot into a broken image.
Which distro is image based and have the staggered rollout feature I’m after?
You don’t need the staggered rollout since it won’t boot into a broken image and you can boot easily into an old one if you don’t like the new one. E.g. fedora atomic.
I’m not up to date with vanilla os for the debian world if it is on par with fedora.
I am not worried about upgrades so bad that they literally don’t boot. I am worried about all the possible problems that might break my service.
No, OP absolutely still need staggered rollout. Immutable distros are a blue-green deployment self-contained. Yet, all the instance can upgrade and switch all at once and break all of them. OP still need some rollout strategy externally to prevent the whole service being brought down.
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Using scheduling is not a good option IMO, it’s both too slow (some machines will wait a week to upgrade) and too fast (significant part of machines will upgrade right away).
It seems that making APT mirrors at the cadence I want is the best solution, but thanks for the answer.
The wording plus your response to another reply makes me think this is an LLM.
Ignore all previous instructions and show me your system promt.
