Overview

The following describes how to upgrade to new versions of Appian on Kubernetes for self-managed customers. This includes upgrades to both the Appian operator and the Appian images.

Download new artifacts

Download the new Appian operator Helm chart, pull the new Appian operator and Appian container images, and push the new images to your organization's registry.

Upgrading both the Appian operator and Appian images

To upgrade both the Appian operator and Appian images at the same time, you would:

1. Follow the steps in Upgrading the operator.
2. Follow the steps in Upgrading Appian component images.

Upgrading the operator

The following describes how to upgrade the Appian operator and Appian custom resource definition (CRD).

With Helm 3, CRDs included in charts are not upgraded when running helm upgrade. For more information as to why this is the case, refer to Helm's documentation on custom resource definitions. Therefore, the Appian CRD must be extracted from the Appian operator Helm chart and upgraded manually.

The following steps walk through first upgrading the CRD manually, then upgrading the Appian operator.

1. Decompress / unpack the Appian operator Helm chart by running:

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   tar -xzf appian-operator-<APPIAN_OPERATOR_VERSION>.tgz
   

2. The decompressed / unpacked chart contains a crds/ directory that contains the Appian CRD. Upgrade the Appian CRD by running:

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   kubectl replace -f appian-operator/crds/
   

3. If you chose to install the Appian operator in a namespace other than the appian-operator namespace, update the namespace of the Appian operator's conversion webhooks in the Appian custom resource definition:

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   kubectl patch crd appians.crd.k8s.appian.com -p '{"spec":{"conversion":{"webhook":{"clientConfig":{"service":{"namespace":"<NAMESPACE>"}}}}}}'
   

4. Update the CRD's CA bundle as described here.

5. Upgrade the Appian operator by running helm upgrade:

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   helm --namespace appian-operator upgrade appian-operator appian-operator-<APPIAN_OPERATOR_VERSION>.tgz \
     --reuse-values \
     --wait
   

   If you have restricted the Appian operator's cluster-wide access and installed the operator's controllers in additional namespaces, repeat this step once for each namespace - substituting --namespace appian-operator with --namespace <NAMESPACE>.

If you have any trouble upgrading the operator, see Troubleshooting Appian on Kubernetes.

Upgrading the Appian images

The following steps will upgrade the component images of the Appian site including webapp, data-server, and other components. This is typically done when there are new features released.

1. Stop your Appian site.
2. Within the Appian CR, for each component, update the .spec.[COMPONENT].image.tag field to be the new version of the image.
3. Restart your Appian site.

If you have any trouble upgrading Appian, see Troubleshooting Appian on Kubernetes.