# Load Balancing Service Upgrade Guide

This document outlines steps and notes for operators for reference when upgrading their Load Balancing service from previous versions of OpenStack.

## Plan the upgrade

Before jumping right in to the upgrade process, there are a few considerations operators should observe:

- Carefully read the release notes, particularly the upgrade section.

- Upgrades are only supported between sequential releases. For example, upgrading from Pike to Queens is supported while from Pike to Rocky is not.

- It is expected that each Load Balancing provider provides its own upgrade documentation. Please refer to it for upgrade instructions.

- The Load Balancing service builds on top of other OpenStack services, e.g. Compute, Networking, Image and Identify. On a staging environment, upgrade the Load Balancing service and verify it works as expected. For example, a good indicator would be the successful run of Octavia Tempest tests <https://opendev.org/openstack/octavia-tempest-plugin>.

## Cold upgrade

In a cold upgrade (also known as offline upgrade and non-rolling upgrade), the Load Balancing service is not available because all the control plane services have to be taken down. No data plane disruption should result during the course of upgrading. In the case of the Load Balancing service, it means no downtime nor reconfiguration of service-managed resources (e.g. load balancers, listeners, pools and members).

1. Run the octavia-status upgrade check command to validate that Octavia is ready for upgrade.

2. Gracefully stop all Octavia processes. We recommend in this order: Housekeeping, Health manager, API, Worker.

3. Optional: Make a backup of the database.

4. Upgrade all Octavia control plane nodes to the next release. Remember to also upgrade library dependencies (e.g. octavia-lib). If upgrading Octavia from distribution packages, your system package manager is expected to handle this automatically.

5. Verify that all configuration option names are up-to-date with latest Octavia version. For example, pay special attention to deprecated configurations.

6. Run `octavia-db-manage upgrade head` from any Octavia node to upgrade the database and run any corresponding database migrations.

7. Start all Octavia processes.

8. Build a new image and upload it to the Image service. Do not forget to tag the image. We recommend updating images frequently to include latest bug fixes and security issues on installed software (operating system, amphora agent and its dependencies).

## Amphorae upgrade

Amphorae upgrade may be required in the advent of API incompatibility between the running amphora agent (old version) and Octavia services (new version). Octavia will automatically recover by failing over amphorae and thus new amphora instances will be running on latest amphora agent code. The drawback in that case is data plane downtime during failover. API breakage is a very rare case, and would be highlighted in the release notes if this scenario occurs.

## Upgrade testing

Grenade is an OpenStack test harness project that validates upgrade scenarios between releases. It uses DevStack to initially perform a base OpenStack install and then upgrade to a target version.

Octavia has a Grenade plugin and a CI gate job that validates cold upgrades of an OpenStack deployment with Octavia enabled. The plugin creates load balancing resources and verifies that resources are still working during and after upgrade.

this page last updated: 2026-03-10 18:02:42

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