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Upgrade Kong Gateway OSS

Free open-source plugin

This document guides you through the process of upgrading Kong Gateway (OSS) to the latest version. To upgrade to prior versions, find the version number in the Upgrade doc in GitHub.

Suggested upgrade path

Unless indicated otherwise in one of the upgrade paths of this document, it is possible to upgrade Kong without downtime.

Assuming that Kong is already running on your system, acquire the latest version from any of the available installation methods and proceed to install it, overriding your previous installation.

If you are planning to make modifications to your configuration, this is a good time to do so.

Then, run migration to upgrade your database schema:

$ kong migrations up [-c configuration_file]

If the command is successful, and no migration ran (no output), then you only have to reload Kong:

$ kong reload [-c configuration_file]

Reminder: kong reload leverages the Nginx reload signal that seamlessly starts new workers, which take over from old workers before those old workers are terminated. In this way, Kong will serve new requests via the new configuration, without dropping existing in-flight connections.

Upgrade to 2.8.x

Kong adopts a structured versioning approach, which makes a distinction between “major”, “minor”, and “patch” versions. The upgrade path will be different depending on which previous version from which you are migrating.

If you are migrating from 2.x.x, upgrading into 2.8.x is a minor upgrade, but read below for important instructions on database migration, especially for Cassandra users.

If you are migrating from 1.x, upgrading into 2.8.x is a major upgrade, so, in addition, be aware of any breaking changes between the 1.x and 2.x series below, further detailed in the CHANGELOG.md document.

Dependencies

If you are using the provided binary packages, all necessary dependencies for the gateway are bundled and you can skip this section.

If you are building your dependencies by hand, there are changes since the previous release, so you will need to rebuild them with the latest patches.

The required OpenResty version for kong 2.8.x is 1.19.9.1. This is more recent than the version in Kong 2.5.0 (which used 1.19.3.2). In addition to an upgraded OpenResty, you will need the correct OpenResty patches for this new version, including the latest release of lua-kong-nginx-module. The kong-build-tools repository contains openresty-build-tools, which allows you to more easily build OpenResty with the necessary patches and modules.

Deprecations

The external go-pluginserver project is considered deprecated in favor of the embedded server approach.

Starting with Kong Gateway 2.8.0.0, Kong is not building new open-source CentOS images. Support for running open-source Kong Gateway on CentOS on is now deprecated, as CentOS has reached End of Life (OEL). This means that if you are running Kong Gateway on CentOS, you will need to migrate to another distribution to upgrade to 2.8.x

Template changes

There are Changes in the Nginx configuration file, between kong 2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, 2.7.x, and 2.8.x.

To view the configuration changes between versions, clone the Kong repository and run git diff on the configuration templates, using -w for greater readability.

Here’s how to see the differences between previous versions and 2.8.x:

git clone https://github.com/kong/kong
cd kong
git diff -w 2.0.0 2.7.0 kong/templates/nginx_kong*.lua

Note: Adjust the starting version number (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, 2.7.x, 2.8.x) to the version number you are currently using.

To produce a patch file, use the following command:

git diff 2.0.0 2.7.0 kong/templates/nginx_kong*.lua > kong_config_changes.diff

Note: Adjust the starting version number (2.0.x, 2.1.x, 2.2.x, 2.3.x, 2.4.x, 2.5.x, 2.6.x, 2.7.x, 2.8.x) to the version number you are currently using.

Suggested upgrade path

Version prerequisites for migrating to version 2.8.x

The lowest version that Kong 2.8.x supports migrating from is 1.0.x. If you are migrating from a version lower than 0.14.1, you need to migrate to 0.14.1 first. Then, once you are migrating from 0.14.1, please migrate to 1.5.x first.

The steps for upgrading from 0.14.1 to 1.5.x are the same as upgrading from 0.14.1 to Kong 1.0. Please follow the steps described in the “Migration Steps from 0.14” in the

Suggested Upgrade Path for Kong 1.0 with the addition of the kong migrations migrate-apis command, which you can use to migrate legacy apis configurations.

Once you migrated to 1.5.x, you can follow the instructions in the section below to migrate to 2.8.x.

Upgrade from 1.0.x - 2.7.x to 2.8.x

PostgreSQL

Kong 2.8.x supports a no-downtime migration model. This means that while the migration is ongoing, you will have two Kong clusters running, sharing the same database. (This is sometimes called the Blue/Green migration model.)

The migrations are designed so that the new version of Kong is able to use the database as it is migrated while the old Kong cluster keeps working until it is time to decommission it. For this reason, the migration is split into two steps, performed via commands kong migrations up (which does only non-destructive operations) and kong migrations finish (which puts the database in the final expected state for Kong 2.8.x).

1. Download 2.8.x, and configure it to point to the same datastore as your old (1.0 to 2.0) cluster. Run kong migrations up.
2. After that finishes running, both the old (2.x.x) and new (2.8.x) clusters can now run simultaneously. Start provisioning 2.8.x nodes, but do not use their Admin API yet. If you need to perform Admin API requests, these should be made to the old cluster’s nodes. The reason is to prevent the new cluster from generating data that is not understood by the old cluster.
3. Gradually divert traffic away from your old nodes, and into your 2.8.x cluster. Monitor your traffic to make sure everything is going smoothly.
4. When your traffic is fully migrated to the 2.8.x cluster, decommission your old nodes.
5. From your 2.8.x cluster, run: kong migrations finish. From this point on, it will not be possible to start nodes in the old cluster pointing to the same datastore anymore. Only run this command when you are confident that your migration was successful. From now on, you can safely make Admin API requests to your 2.8.x nodes.

Cassandra

Deprecation notice: Cassandra as a backend database for Kong Gateway is deprecated. This means the feature will eventually be removed. Our target for Cassandra removal is the Kong Gateway 3.4 release, and some new features might not be supported with Cassandra in the Kong Gateway 3.0 release.

Due to internal changes, the table schemas used by Kong 2.8.x on Cassandra are incompatible with those used by Kong 2.1.x (or lower). Migrating using the usual commands kong migrations up and kong migrations finish will require a small window of downtime, since the old and new versions cannot use the database at the same time. Alternatively, to keep your previous version fully operational while the new one initializes, you will need to transfer the data to a new keyspace via a database dump, as described below:

1. Download 2.8.x, and configure it to point to a new keyspace. Run kong migrations bootstrap.
2. Once that finishes running, both the old (pre-2.1) and new (2.8.x) clusters can now run simultaneously, but the new cluster does not have any data yet.
3. On the old cluster, run kong config db_export. This will create a file kong.yml with a database dump.
4. Transfer the file to the new cluster and run kong config db_import kong.yml. This will load the data into the new cluster.
5. Gradually divert traffic away from your old nodes, and into your 2.8.x cluster. Monitor your traffic to make sure everything is going smoothly.
6. When your traffic is fully migrated to the 2.8.x cluster, decommission your old nodes.

Installing 2.8.x on a fresh datastore

The following commands should be used to prepare a new 2.8.x cluster from a fresh datastore. By default the kong CLI tool will load the configuration from /etc/kong/kong.conf, but you can optionally use the flag -c to indicate the path to your configuration file:

$ kong migrations bootstrap [-c /path/to/your/kong.conf]
$ kong start [-c /path/to/your/kong.conf]

Unless indicated otherwise in one of the upgrade paths of this document, it is possible to upgrade Kong without downtime.

Assuming that Kong is already running on your system, acquire the latest version from any of the available installation methods and proceed to install it, overriding your previous installation.

If you are planning to make modifications to your configuration, this is a good time to do so.

Then, run migration to upgrade your database schema:

$ kong migrations up [-c configuration_file]

If the command is successful, and no migration ran (no output), then you only have to reload Kong:

$ kong reload [-c configuration_file]

Reminder: kong reload leverages the Nginx reload signal that seamlessly starts new workers, which take over from old workers before those old workers are terminated. In this way, Kong will serve new requests via the new configuration, without dropping existing in-flight connections.