Cheers to my coworker Taryn for her blog post about how she did an extremely complex series of 30 Microsoft SqlServer upgrades.
If you've seen the film "Apollo 13", there's a scene where they have to get something right in the simulator before they can do it in space. That's basically what she had to do.
Read the post here: How we upgraded Stack Overflow to SQL Server 2017
Here's some takeaways:
- Set up a lab environment to test complex changes.
- Communicate with your users.
- Write a detailed playbook.
- Don't do it alone.
- Ask for help from all over.
- Keep a lab notebook.
- Record it for posterity!
I'm super proud to have people like Taryn on our SRE team at Stack Overflow!
(Would you like to work with awesome people like Taryn? We're have many of open positions including a west-coast (US/Pacific or compatible) Cloud/Azure SRE, an Internal IT Support Engineer (remote or NYC), and a Junior Technology Concierge Help Desk (London))
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