High Availability in Lifecycle Management of Cloud-Native Network Functions : A Near-Zero Downtime Database Version Change Prototype

Abstract: Ensuring high system availability is a crucial goal for many organizations, such as Ericsson. In this context, databases play a significant role as they represent a fundamental element that affects system availability within today’s complex technological environments. Mitigating downtime and maintaining high availability during database version changes are essential to ensure seamless continuity of business and system operations, such as data transactions, queries, and administrative tasks. In this project, we developed a prototype system to facilitate near-zero downtime during database version changes, thus preserving service availability and ensuring the process remains transparent to end users. Contrary to traditional database versioning approaches in the telecommunication industry, which require extensive downtime for data backup, validation, and migration, our system applies the established Blue-Green release strategy in a novel way. It benefits from the Logical Replication feature of PostgreSQL for data synchronization and further automates it for cloud-native deployments using the Kubernetes Operator Pattern. The entire database version change operation is automated by applying a Kubernetes Operator Pattern, ensuring uninterrupted external access to the system during the version change process. This innovative approach holds significant potential to augment database management practices, leading to enhanced system availability and reliability for applications deployed on cloud-native infrastructure.