Updating Your Matillion HA Cluster

Overview

This article describes the options available to you when it comes to keeping your Matillion ETL high availability (HA) cluster's software up-to-date on AWS.

There are two ways to update:

• Create a new cluster and migrate your work.
• In-place update.

The preferred, and safest, way to upgrade is to launch a new Matillion ETL cluster (running the latest version), and use the migration tool to copy your work from the old cluster to the new one. This option gives you a simple, low-risk back out plan.

When to update

We recommend you update Matillion ETL as soon as a new release is available, to take advantage of the latest features and performance enhancements.

A new version will become available roughly every eight weeks. As soon as this happens, you'll see a message in the Notices tab at the bottom right of the screen in the Matillion ETL user interface.

Create a new cluster and migrate your work

With this option, you launch a new HA cluster, using the same settings as your existing one.

We recommend that you create a set of re-runnable scripts that will enable you to automate the build of a new HA cluster. For example, using CloudFormation, based on the templates that Matillion ETL make available for download.

Once the new HA cluster has been created:

• In your network settings, allow the new load balancer to accept incoming connections on ports 80 and 443 from the load balancer of the existing HA cluster.
• Use the migration tool to copy your work.
• Verify that the new server is working correctly.
• Switch off all schedules on the old HA cluster, replacing them with schedules running on the new cluster.
• Turn off the nodes of the old cluster, keeping them for a defined period of time as a backup.

In-place update

Choose a time when schedules aren't due to run, and proceed as follows.

artifacts.matillion.com/rpm/matillion-metl/stable
artifacts.matillion.com/rpm/matillion-cdata/stable

Switch off Matillion ETL on all nodes

1. SSH onto each node in turn and issue this command:

sudo service tomcat stop

2. Confirm that Tomcat is actually stopped via the following command. It should return no active processes:

ps -ef | grep java

Take a backup of all nodes

We strongly recommend you complete this step, since this will give you a back out option if you decide to revert to the original configuration for any reason.

1. Document the current date and time (reference for Point in Time recovery of RDS Postgres instance, if required).

2. In the EC2 Management Console, locate the instance running Matillion ETL and select it.

3. Find Root devices and then select the EBS ID of the volume.

4. Right-click on the volume and select Create Snapshot.

5. Enter a Name and Description for your snapshot, including the name of the server.

6. Repeat for the other EC2 node.

7. In the EC2 dashboard click SNAPSHOTS, and wait for creation to complete on both instances.

Perform the updates

1. SSH to the first EC2 instance.

2. Install Matillion updates:

sudo yum update matillion-universal

3. Install Linux security updates:

sudo yum update --security

4. Repeat for the second EC2 instance.

Restart Matillion ETL

1. SSH to the first EC2 instance and use this command:

sudo service tomcat start

2. Repeat on the second EC2 instance.

Testing

Confirm that you can open all the following in a web browser, and that you can log on to Matillion ETL:

• Address of first server.
• Address of second server.
• Load balancer.

Back out of the update

If you decide to revert to the original version, the steps are:

1. Recreate both EC2 instances from the snapshots.
2. Revert the RDS database to the point-in-time when the backup was taken.
3. Restart Matillion ETL on both nodes.

Cleanup

Set a calendar reminder to delete the backup snapshots.