Infrastructure

Learn about Upsolver's infrastructure and how this impacts your account.

Read the following FAQs to learn about the testing and deployment of new Upsolver versions and dry-run clusters.

What is the testing and deployment process for new Upsolver versions?

The continuous release cycle at Upsolver consists of constant improvements, up to twice a week, to the data ingestion mechanism and other infrastructure elements. Below is the process prior to the deployment of each software version to customers' clusters.

Stage	Environment	Details	Requirement
Feature-specific tests	Dev / QA	Based on the requirement of each feature or bug fix, tests are done to validate its performance and stability	All tests are completed successfully
Automated QA sanity tests	QA	Common platform usage scenarios are run to ensure no functionality has been affected by the code changes	All tests are completed successfully
Manual QA interface tests	QA	Main elements of the user interface are tested to ensure usability has not been affected by the code changes	All tests are completed successfully
2 Internal dry runs	Staging	The dry run mechanism runs both the existing and new versions on a small sample data set for each cluster, to verify data is handled correctly	Data processed and written by both versions is consistent and without differences
Customer clusters dry run	Production	The dry run mechanism runs both the existing and new versions on a small sample data set for each cluster, to verify data is handled correctly	Data processed and written by both versions is consistent and without differences

Stage

Environment

Details

Requirement

Feature-specific tests

Dev / QA

Based on the requirement of each feature or bug fix, tests are done to validate its performance and stability

All tests are completed successfully

Automated QA sanity tests

Common platform usage scenarios are run to ensure no functionality has been affected by the code changes

All tests are completed successfully

Manual QA interface tests

Main elements of the user interface are tested to ensure usability has not been affected by the code changes

All tests are completed successfully

2 Internal dry runs

Staging

The dry run mechanism runs both the existing and new versions on a small sample data set for each cluster, to verify data is handled correctly

Data processed and written by both versions is consistent and without differences

Customer clusters dry run

Production

The dry run mechanism runs both the existing and new versions on a small sample data set for each cluster, to verify data is handled correctly

Data processed and written by both versions is consistent and without differences

What is a dry-run cluster?

As part of testing a new version of Upsolver before deploying it to customers, dry-run clusters are created for a limited time to test the changes in safe, replicated environments.

Dry-run clusters mimic the setup and configuration of a production system, enabling our developers to safely check the new version on a replicated environment and discover any differences.

Occasionally, customers may notice instances in their accounts with a dry run suffix. These are used by Upsolver to improve the quality of our next release.

Details and schedule

Usually, dry-run clusters will run for 120 minutes, on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons, replicating all the clusters in an organization. However, in some cases, dry-run clusters run outside of these timeframes, and for shorter/longer times, depending on the testing requirements.

How does this affect you?

Customer data is not affected in any way, nor is the customer billed in the form of Upsolver credits for these instances. Customers are only billed for the uptime of the clusters as part of EC2 payment. Furthermore, dry-run clusters are created with only one EC2 instance, so they can mimic production tasks without raising high costs.