Dare to embrace the magic Auto-Upgrades
... and free up time to craft even better projects!
Yes, I know. I’ve said it before; There are a lot of benefits of having a project on Umbraco Cloud. I wonder why no one has ever asked me what my favorite thing about Umbraco Cloud is... 🤔
If I was asked though, the automagical upgrades is definitely in the top three - perhaps even higher. And our Cloud users definitely think so too - many even use it as a cost-saving argument to their clients, as upgrading becomes way less time consuming - and in most cases even non-existing!
But that’s not their only reason for loving Cloud and the auto-upgrades:
“We spin up projects in no time, we benefit from the opportunity for a true development workflow via Git, we love the amazing support team, the auto upgrades, it just keeps getting better"
Bob Baty-Barr, Senior Developer, The Segal Group, Chicago.
“Working with Umbraco Cloud allows us to be up-to-date with all the newest things in Umbraco. It also helps our developers put their skills on the highest level,”
Marcin Zajkowski, Umbraco Trainer & Certified Master, The Cogworks, Poland.
We keep telling you that with Umbraco Cloud you save a lot of time managing your projects. This is exactly the point of the automatic upgrades on Umbraco Cloud:
Patch? Minor? Major?
Before I just dive head first into explaining the auto-upgrades on Umbraco Cloud, I’m going to give you a quick overview of the version control regime we use on our products - information that will come in handy later on in this post.
We use a three-digit version control regime, e.g. 1.2.3.
The first digit is called Major.
The second digit is called Minor.
The third digit is called Patch.
The above is an example of a recent version of the Umbraco CMS 7.9.2 - 7 being the Major, 9 being the Minor and 2 being the Patch. The same version control regime is used through all of our other products; Umbraco Forms, Courier and Deploy (if you want a more thorough explanation of the version control regime you can find it here)
Okay, now we’re ready to move on to the fun part 😀:
What are auto-upgrades?
I can give it to you in 4 words: An-Extra-Coffee-Break ☕
The beauty of these automagical upgrades is that you do not have to lift a finger in order to always run the latest, greatest and most secure patch version of Umbraco! Now that’s pretty dang cool, am I right?
Why 🤔
We automatically upgrade Umbraco Cloud projects to make it easier for you to run the latest version. Always running the latest version means you’ll always benefit from new features and always feel assured that your project has received any necessary security fixes. It’s basically best practise and a way for you and your clients to always get the most out of Umbraco.
When 🤔
We auto-upgrade Umbraco Cloud projects whenever a new patch version of the Umbraco CMS, Forms, Deploy or Courier is ready for release. We also do auto-upgrades in the rare case that a security fix is required in any of our products.
How 🤔
We’re very careful when we roll-out the auto-upgrades. How we do it is pretty straight forward:
- We run a test to check that your project is ready for the upgrade
- If all looks good we start applying the upgrade
- Does a project have two or more environment we start by upgrading the Development, then the Staging and finally the Live environment.
To ensure the state of the projects we take a snapshot of the home page before and after applying the upgrade. If anything looks different between the two snapshots we roll back the upgrade. You can find a more detailed description of the auto-upgrade process on our Umbraco Cloud Upgrading Documentation.
Are you experiencing that your Umbraco Cloud project wasn’t upgraded with the latest patch release, there could be several reasons why. Head over to the documentation where you’ll find a list of potential reasons why the auto-upgrade wasn’t applied to your project.
Minor and Major versions
When we release new Minor and Major versions of our products we are not upgrading Umbraco Cloud projects automagically.
But don’t worry, it’s still extremely easy and simple to apply the upgrade to your project - you only have to “lift one finger” (wink-wink 😉)
We write a blog post when at new Minor and Major version of Umbraco CMS is being released, and in these posts you’ll find step-by-step instructions on how to apply the upgrade in Umbraco Cloud. Take a look at the blog post about the latest new Minor version of Umbraco: Umbraco version 7.9 and Forms 7.0 is out!
We’re of course talking bigger upgrades here, and that’s why we’re more careful and let you test everything before implementing. But it is still super fast to upgrade. And it is indeed still best practise - and it’s, of course, a no brainer that if you ensure to always opt-in on the latest Minor and Major versions, then all future upgrades will be as smooth as possible. Not to mention all the new beneficial features you’re able to start using!
Ready to convert your projects from Manual to Automatic?
Now, that all sounds pretty straight forward, right? It is! The automagical upgrades is definitely one of the biggest benefits of having an Umbraco Cloud project.
Do you still have some questions about how this works? Have a look at the Umbraco Cloud Upgrades documentation - we have outlined every little step in detail. You are also very welcome to reach out to me and my fellow Support Warriors in the Umbraco Cloud Chat if you cannot find the answers you are looking for.
Now, go and try create a test-project on Umbraco Cloud for free for 14 days - there’s a very big chance you’ll experience an upgrade during your trial… if it’s automagic, you might not even notice 😉
Until next time. // Sofie, out
