Provide Maintenance Mode feature for Plattformupgrades That gracefully dry out the environment

[Michael_it]

Brief Description
Provide Maintenance Mode feature for Plattformupgrades That gracefully dry out the environment
Benefits / Value
currently you do a hard Stop to CSA or OO which means there could be lifecycle processes pending OO Flows running. this can cause several unexpected failures when shuting down the services in this mode
Benefit of implementing is controlled shutdown of a very utilizied environment to allow running jobs to finish but stop getting new ones.
currently all upgrade guides suggest you should finish all Flows /CSA processes before starting the upgrade. but very utilized environments dont have a period where nothing comes in
Design details
Explain how would you like this idea designed / implemented
This is mainly for OO and CSA. setting maintenance mode for the suite would mean you dont sshutdown services imeadiatly. active maintenance in OO means no new flows via UI/API/Scheduler . Running flows will continou until finished.
For CSA it could mean you either directly accept no new request or you accept request but dont start Lifecycles. probably for a start accepting nothing at all would be ok. also here waiting that at least open processes instances finishes. but then do not start next process instance.
please also take into account the cross product dependecies. When OO goes to maintenance CSA cant launch flows anymore. so probably CSA part should go first into Maintenance then OO

[Federico Fortini]

Hi @Michael_it, we had the needings of a simialr features. Hower we managed to resolve this in a quite smart way. To prevent CSA from starting new flow in OO, you can simply switch the approval policy of your Offering from the default "Automatic" policy, to a new customer created one, then this policy can be changed to Automatic or Manual approval.

Let me better explain that. Let's say we had created a new policy called "Default policy for Organization CONTOSO". This policy has the "Automatic" approval checkbox flagged. Every Offering that you will publish, will be tied to this this Approval Policy.

When you need to plan a shutdown, you can switch that policy from Automatic to Manual. In this way you can prevent CSA from starting new flow in OO.

We actually have a lot of policy, and we had created a flow in OO that is changing all of these policy from Automatic to Manual using CSA REST APIs. Of course we could restore all the policyes back to their state using the same flow.

Hope this help!

[Michael_it]

Hi @Federico Fortini,

that is indeed a clever workaround.

currently this would be very complex for us as we would not only need to switch the automatic approval but also used approval policies and the offering publishing.

as far as i know the default approval is just at Order and Modify so you would need to activate it for maintenance also for Cancel and for all lifecycle actions.

we also have already delegated templates where the approval policy launches it self an OO flow so those would need to be switched to a different policy.

as far as i know all this would not cover Resource Pool Sync flows as well as Orderings that are already approved and reserved (start at a certain date orders)

so we would need to program a quite complex backup/restore process to make those changes.

at the moment we dry out a lot that comes in via CSA by disabling the MPP and placing a maintenance page. (also the MPP api we send via Reverse proxy and disable as well)

So we get already most of the customer interfacing requests away.

never the less some more integrated maintenance functionality in the Products would be great. at the end would like to see 0 downtime upgrades