We have now introduced a 2 week deprecation time frame for compatibility between API-scheduler and worker.
In general, we recommend continuous deployment, that is in our case, daily deployment. If you stick to that practice then this announcement won't be that important for you. Daily updates also make sense because they ensure that you are receiving important bug fixes and security updates.
But if you are updating our artifacts less frequently, then you should be aware of the following rules:
- Compatibility between worker and API scheduler releases is guaranteed if the time interval between their release dates does not exceed 2 weeks. Beyond this time frame the protocol between worker and API scheduler may become incompatible.
- Compatibility with your persistence (database and config files) is guaranteed forever, unless you opt in to breaking changes explicitly.
The release date of the artifacts is encoded in the container image name and in a container label called “com.aleph-alpha.image-id”. For example, if you are currently running a worker that dates from 2024-01-01 and an API scheduler that dates from 2024-01-01 as well then you can update to any worker version up to including 2024-01-13.
For upgrading the API scheduler (or worker) image to a version that is more than 2 weeks younger its counterpart then you can either take offline, update and restart both the scheduler and the worker images simultaneously, or you can update both image versions in a lockstep fashion.
For details, please see sections “1.2.5 How to update the API scheduler docker image” and “1.2.6 How to update the worker docker image” in the latest version of our operations manual.