Successfully planned and executed a fleet-wide production operating system upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The rollout encompassed approximately 36 cloud instances alongside physical edge devices.
Execution Highlights
- Multi-Hop Pathing: Validated a repeatable multi-hop upgrade path across highly mixed instance types, explicitly targeting legacy physical hardware running non-standard boot configurations.
- Health Validation: Implemented an end-to-end pre-flight and post-upgrade validation checklist verifying OS stability, container runtime health, storage persistence, and application-layer availability.
- Zero-Downtime Orchestration: Coordinated sequenced execution over dozens of active production hosts using consistent, auditable rollback procedures, resulting in zero unplanned downtime.
Root Cause Analysis & Remediation
During the rollout, engineering isolated an upstream container runtime regression that silently lowered critical resource limits under high production loads.
- Action Taken: Developed, tested, and shipped a fleet-wide systemd configuration patch to stabilize the container environment.
- Prevention: Folded resource limit validation rules directly into the standard automated pre-flight validation checklist to prevent regression in future image updates.
Updated Core Tech Stack
- OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat)
- Kernel: Linux 6.17 AWS kernel
- Runtimes: Docker Engine 29.x / containerd 2.2.x / systemd / Bash
- IaC: Terraform / Packer