Best Practices

Best Practices to adhere when using WSO2 Updates¶

Here are the guidelines and recommendations to receive best update experience with WSO2 Updates 2.0.

1. Update frequently

   Frequent update of products will ensure the product is bug free and always up to dated with new features, security enhancements and improvements. WSO2 recommends updating your systems weekly or bi-weekly. Before directly applying any updates to your production system, WSO2 always recommends applying any update to lower environments such as testing, development or staging environments which has a similar product distribution as in production environment.

2. Add custom configurations or modifications
Follow guidelines when adding customization to product pack files. This will reduce the merge conflicts. Refer how to reduce merge conflicts.

3. Run tests
WSO2 thoroughly tests and certifies each update and hotfix released. Regardless of whether an update or hotfix running tests on your update environment ensures that all existing and new functionalities are working perfectly fine.

4. Getting Updates to a lockdown Environment
The best practices disseminating updates to production environment with no internet connection is as follows:
 1. First receive the updates in a lower environment that is connected to the internet.
 2. Test the environment thoroughly.
 3. Perform security checks mandate by your organization and verify the updated pack.
 4. Last move the verified pack to the lockdown environment securely.

5. Use a Configuration Management tool.
There are a myriad of benefits of using a Configuration Management Tool. WSO2 advise the use of Configuration Management Tool such as Puppet and Ansible to carry configuration changes flawlessly. Read more on our Continuous Update Document.

6. Assess whether the environment getting the new updates has enough disk space before running the updates tool.
It is important to have adequate disk space in the environment that gets updates. When the update command is initiated, the tool takes a full backup of the current product, loads the applicable new updates and thereafter applies the new updates to the product pack. This process requires that your environment has enough space, and the tool calculates the same using the following equation:
 (3 x packsize) + (updates_count x update_size) + 500mb
to ensure an error free update retrieval, check for adequate space before starting the update process.

7. WSO2 advise you to keep a copy of your most reliable Docker image in your own private Docker registry for future usage. Further, you can run security and other crucial compliance checks before you onboard an image to your private registry. Read the step-by step guidelines on this by clicking here.