Anyone who has ever attempted to upgrade a cloud platform, be it from Microsoft, OpenStack, or VMware, will readily attest that doing so in a live production environment is not for the faint of heart. No Cloud Admin wants to suffer through a failed upgrade that causes a production cloud to be degraded, unavailable, or at risk of losing data. But too many admins have spent sleepless night restoring or even having to rebuild a platform where the upgrade went completely wrong.

That’s why new Platform9 (the company I currently work for) customers are often genuinely and happily surprised by our painless, zero-touch OpenStack upgrade, as detailed in Platform9 blog posts here and here. It’s certainly one of the value propositions we deliver as a cloud management-as-a-Service provider that gets people’s attention. So how can we at Platform9 deliver something that seems still so difficult for so many providers and software vendors? If you are interested in finding out, read my Platform9 blog post to look under the hood of Platform9 upgrades and to start thinking cloud-native.