Seeking Advice on Appian On-Premise Upgrade Path (23.3 to 25.3) with HA Setup

Hi Community,

We’re planning to upgrade our on-premise Appian environment from version 23.3 to 25.3. Based on the official documentation, it appears that a direct upgrade isn’t supported, and we’ll need to follow a sequential path: 23.3 → 25.1 → 25.3.

I’d appreciate any insights on the following:

  1. Is this sequential upgrade path (via 25.1) the recommended or most stable approach?
  2. For those running Appian in a High Availability (HA) setup, how did you manage the upgrade across multiple instances?
  3. Were there any challenges or performance impacts during the production upgrade, especially related to backup/restore of large volumes of data?
  4. Any lessons learned or best practices you’d recommend to ensure a smooth upgrade?

Thanks in advance for your guidance and experiences!

Best,
Ramanji

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  • 0
    Certified Lead Developer
    Is this sequential upgrade path (via 25.1) the recommended or most stable approach?

    Yes, 23.3 -> 25.1 -> 25.3 is required since 25.3 requires minimum version 23.4, making the intermediate step mandatory.

    For those running Appian in a High Availability (HA) setup, how did you manage the upgrade across multiple instances?

     Use rolling upgrades -> take one node offline, upgrade it, validate, bring it back, then proceed to next node while maintaining service availability.

    Were there any challenges or performance impacts during the production upgrade, especially related to backup/restore of large volumes of data?

    Expect 2-4+ hour downtime for database schema migrations on large datasets and potential plugin compatibility issues with each version jump.

    Any lessons learned or best practices you’d recommend to ensure a smooth upgrade?

    Test the exact sequential upgrade path (23.3 -> 25.1 -> 25.3) in a production-clone environment and maintain full backups at each step.