Should you upgrade lower or higher environment first and why

Certified Senior Developer

Hi All,

I came across a question where the environment should get upgraded to latest version. Should we start upgrading the higher environments first and go down to lower environment upgrade or vice-versa, and what will be the impact in both cases. Can someone help in knowing this impact?

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  • Certified Lead Developer

    About the only issue I could see, it turns out is about the only issue mentioned by anyone else here, which is good.  That issue is, if Dev is at a higher version than Prod, then you can't be certain Prod will run everything that comes out of Dev.  If Dev has been upgraded, Prod will have to be upgraded before any development can go from Dev to Prod.  So if Prod does get upgraded last, it has to be very soon after, because the upgrade becomes a blocker for all development.

    Also, if you do see any aberrant behavior when you upgrade, it's not going to have the impact on lower environments that it would have on Production.  The key thing I would be looking out for is Removals.  Those could play havoc with your apps.  Since you don't want end users to see everything suddenly broken, Prod probably shouldn't be the very first.

    So Prod can't be first, and might not want to be last, that puts it in the middle.  Dev is OK being last, so that leaves Test first.  If you only had Dev and Prod, I'd say not wanting to see everything broken would trump dev being blocked.  In that case, I'd say Dev and then Prod a week later.  But again, what are you doing without a Test environment?  Get a Test environment! 

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  • Certified Lead Developer

    About the only issue I could see, it turns out is about the only issue mentioned by anyone else here, which is good.  That issue is, if Dev is at a higher version than Prod, then you can't be certain Prod will run everything that comes out of Dev.  If Dev has been upgraded, Prod will have to be upgraded before any development can go from Dev to Prod.  So if Prod does get upgraded last, it has to be very soon after, because the upgrade becomes a blocker for all development.

    Also, if you do see any aberrant behavior when you upgrade, it's not going to have the impact on lower environments that it would have on Production.  The key thing I would be looking out for is Removals.  Those could play havoc with your apps.  Since you don't want end users to see everything suddenly broken, Prod probably shouldn't be the very first.

    So Prod can't be first, and might not want to be last, that puts it in the middle.  Dev is OK being last, so that leaves Test first.  If you only had Dev and Prod, I'd say not wanting to see everything broken would trump dev being blocked.  In that case, I'd say Dev and then Prod a week later.  But again, what are you doing without a Test environment?  Get a Test environment! 

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