Before planning to upgrade from Classic Cloud to Cloud Next, ensure that you see the information in the following sections:
The upgrade process starts with your non-production environments and consists of the following steps. Acquia owns most of the upgrade process for your application. However, there are a couple of steps that might require your team’s action.
Step # | Description | Customer action |
---|---|---|
1 | Acquia notifies the customer team through a Support ticket that the application is ready to be upgraded to Cloud Next. Important As part of the upgrade process, there are potential changes that require customer action. If detected, Acquia updates the ticket indicating the specific customer actions. |
Based on Acquia’s update, make the changes to make your platform compatible to be upgraded to Cloud Next. |
2 | Acquia updates the existing Support ticket to share the upgrade scheduling details for the non-production environment. Typically, this happens 2 weeks prior to customer’s non-production environment upgrade. | NA |
3 | Acquia upgrades the non-production environment on the scheduled date and time. | NA |
4 | Acquia updates the Support ticket to confirm that the upgrade was successful. Important If the non-production environment upgrade fails, Acquia updates the Support ticket to notify the team and provides details of the upgrade and next steps. |
NA |
5 | Customers must test the non-production environment. | Test the non-production environment to ensure everything works as expected. For information on what to test after the upgrade, see Testing your environments upgrading to Cloud Next |
6 | Acquia creates a new Support ticket to share the upgrade scheduling details for the production environment. Typically, this happens 2 weeks prior to the production environment upgrade. | NA |
7 | Acquia upgrades the production environment on the scheduled date and time. | NA |
8 | Acquia updates the existing Support ticket to confirm that the upgrade was successful. Important If the production environment upgrade fails, Acquia updates the Support ticket to notify the team and provides details of the upgrade and next steps. |
If you face any technical issues after upgrading to Cloud Next, file a Support ticket. For more information, see Technical issues after upgrading to Cloud Next. |
For more information about upgrading your application to Cloud Next, see:
If your environments are being upgraded to Cloud Next from the Classic Cloud version of Cloud Platform, pay attention to the following changes that may require updates to your code, site configuration, or development processes:
All environments, applications, and subscriptions upgraded to Cloud Next are subject to the March 31st, 2021 revisions to Acquia’s Support Users Guide and Acquia’s Products & Services Guides (Legacy Server-based Pricing Model, Current Views/Visits Pricing Model), especially as they pertain to Acquia’s Resource Limits on dynamically auto-scaling infrastructure. See all sections related to the use of shared resources, infrastructure capacity, and capacity management for more details.
Currently, MySQL Workbench is not fully compatible with Cloud Next. Therefore, customers who are using it to connect to environments running on Cloud Next must use Sequel Pro.
Alternatively, customers can use the following workaround to connect to your environment:
{ssh -L $LOCAL_PORT:$DB_HOST:3306 $SSH_STRING}
Here,
LOCAL_PORT
is the port to which Workbench must connect when using
localhost.DB_HOST
is the hostname obtained from the Cloud Platform user interface.SSH_STRING
is the full connection string from the Cloud Platform user
interface. For example, user@something
.Customers with simpleSAMLphp in an application must make a few changes before upgrading to Cloud Next to ensure ongoing compatibility with both Cloud Classic infrastructure and Cloud Next. For more information, see Implementing SimpleSAML on Cloud Next.
SSH keys that were manually added to an environment before the October 2018 EOL of per-environment SSH key management will not persist after the upgrade to Cloud Next. If your application was running on Cloud Platform Enterprise before that date, visit the Users & Keys page for each of your application’s environments before they are upgraded. You must ensure that all necessary SSH keys are properly associated with users in your subscription’s Teams & Permissions console.
Failure to do so may result in errors whenever users, scripts, development software, automations, or remote services attempt to access those environments after they are upgraded.
The /var/log/sites
directory is no longer available for direct log access
or custom log storage. Use /shared/logs
for custom log storage instead.
Long-running MySQL queries will now be terminated after running for 60 seconds on non-production environments or 5 minutes for production environments. To ensure your environments complete all long-running transactions as expected, wrap them in a MySQL transaction to avoid the risk of data loss or corruption. If your environments require long-running MySQL queries to complete reports or other complex data management processes, contact your Acquia accounts team to request a delay to your upgrade to Cloud Next.
To avoid slow page load times on Cloud Next, applications with the following line of code (or similar) in any Memcache settings files must be commented out before any environments are upgraded to Cloud Next:
# REMOVE or comment out any lines similar to this that set OPT_BINARY_PROTOCOL to true.
$settings['memcache']['options'][Memcached::OPT_BINARY_PROTOCOL] = TRUE;
You must upgrade your Memcache module to the latest version to view Memcache metrics on the memcache_admin page of your Drupal application.
Environments upgraded to Cloud Next are assigned the Memcache memory limit previously associated with their Cloud Classic infrastructure. As a result, for environments previously deployed on Cloud Classic infrastructure with other environments, this setting may be higher than necessary post-upgrade and may need to be reduced to a lower limit to prevent excess resource utilization.
Memcached data is available through CLI by using the acquia-memcache stats command. The mcstat command is currently not available on Cloud Next environments.
To optimize performance for your application after upgrade, access your New Relic APM account and test your environments with Memcache turned on and off during periods of low traffic.
Applications that are less complex may see even better response times
without Memcache on Cloud Next due to improvements to MySQL. You can
disable Memcache on Cloud Next environments by navigating to each
environment’s Configure Environment page,
clicking the Advanced tab, and setting your Memcache memory limit
to 0 MB. Some applications may also need to have this line added to the
settings.php
file to prevent Memcache from running automatically:
define('AH_NO_MEMCACHE_INCLUDE', 1);
Applications running on Cloud Next should test all Remote Administration patches in a Cloud Next non-production environment before pushing changes to the production environment. This ensures that no differences in Cloud Next and Cloud Classic logic impact the way patches behave after deployment in a Cloud Next environment.
Logic requiring access to a tmp or persistent shared directory must be
redirected to $HOME
on Cloud Next.
Acquia strongly recommends that you immediately test your non-production environments as soon as they are upgraded to Cloud Next. This not only ensures that any technical issues can be investigated and resolved quickly with the help of the Acquia Support team, but it also reduces the risk of delays or undesired behavior with your production environment upgrade.
When testing your environments, the following practices are recommended:
Ensure that you note down any anomalous behaviors on each environment’s sites prior to the upgrade so that you can clearly differentiate between existing bugs in your application and new bugs introduced since the upgrade.
After upgrade, load your sites on each environment and verify that they are behaving the same after being upgraded to Cloud Next as they were before the upgrade took place.
Test any custom functionality, focusing on the most critical behaviors of your application, including custom modules, reports, scripts, cron jobs, CI/ CD automations, and connections to remote non-Acquia services.
Verify that cron jobs are both running as expected and logging as expected, keeping in mind that Cloud Next has a new directory for cron logs and custom logs that must be routinely pruned to prevent unnecessary growth of your file system:
/shared/logs
SSH on to your environment to verify that all necessary scripts, Drush commands, automations, and CLI commands that you require are available; some may require updates and adjustments to syntax, and certain CLI commands you had used previously may not be available; a new SSH syntax will be required to access your Prod environment.
If necessary, re-download your Drush aliases to ensure they are compatible with Cloud Next.
For additional recommendations about how to test your application after non-production upgrades, see Common Technical Questions when upgrade to Cloud Next.
If you discover any technical issues after your environments are upgraded to Cloud Next, file a new ticket with Acquia Support and ensure you select an appropriate level of urgency. In the ticket description, include steps to reproduce the problem and a clear summary of how the environment behaved prior to upgrade.
Important
Do not use your maintenance notification Acquia Support ticket to report technical issues.