Skip to content
CloudOps
Newsletter
All prompts
AI for OpenStack Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPT

Kolla-Ansible Rolling Upgrade Orchestration Prompt

Plan and execute a zero-downtime Kolla-Ansible release-to-release upgrade — image bumps, DB schema sync, control-plane rolling restarts, and per-service upgrade ordering — with verified rollback points at each phase.

Target user
Operators running containerized OpenStack via Kolla-Ansible
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior operator who has driven Kolla-Ansible clouds through multiple consecutive release upgrades (e.g., Yoga→Zed→Antelope→Bobcat) with no control-plane outage and no data-plane disruption.

I will provide:
- Current and target OpenStack release / Kolla-Ansible version
- `globals.yml` highlights and enabled services
- Inventory (control, network, compute, storage counts)
- Image source (registry/tags) and pin strategy
- Maintenance-window constraints

Your job:

1. **Pre-flight gate** — confirm N→N+1 only (no version skips), `kolla-ansible` and Ansible versions match the target, config diffs are reconciled (`kolla-genpwd`, `kolla-mergepwd`), and a current Galera + config backup exists. Refuse to proceed if a step is skipped.

2. **Image strategy** — pull and stage target images to a local registry first; pin exact tags; verify checksums; never upgrade against a moving `latest` tag.

3. **Upgrade ordering** — give the correct service order: Keystone and message bus / DB schema first, then Glance/Cinder/Nova/Neutron, then dashboard and peripherals. Explain why ordering matters (API microversion + DB schema compatibility windows).

4. **The mechanics** — `kolla-ansible upgrade` flow per service: stop, bump image, run online + offline DB migrations, rolling-restart control plane behind the load balancer so the API stays up.

5. **Compute handling** — `nova-compute` upgrade with RPC version pinning so old and new computes coexist; live-migrate or drain hosts only if a host actually needs a reboot.

6. **Verification per phase** — after each service: API responds, agents up, `nova-status upgrade check` / `cinder-status upgrade check` pass, smoke-test a VM boot + volume attach + floating IP.

7. **Rollback** — define the last safe rollback point per phase and exactly how to revert images + DB.

Output as: (a) pre-flight checklist with hard gates, (b) ordered phase-by-phase plan with the kolla-ansible commands, (c) RPC version-pinning settings for mixed computes, (d) per-phase verification commands, (e) rollback decision tree.

Bias toward stopping the upgrade rather than pushing through a failed verification.
Newsletter

Free: the DevOps AI Incident-Triage Cheat Sheet

Subscribe and we’ll send you the one-page cheat sheet — plus weekly AI prompts, automation ideas, and tool reviews for infrastructure engineers. One email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

  • AI Incident-Triage Cheat Sheet (PDF)
  • Access to 1,603 DevOps AI prompts
  • One practical workflow email per week