Upgrade patch consul from 1.8.6 to latest 1.14.x

Hi guys,
I am looking to upgrade our consul instances, the servers and agents are in version 1.8.6.
We use consul only for service discovery ( no servicemesh , no acl, no encryption)
My upgrade path based on the documentation looks like this:

Now I have 2 questions:

  • Can I upgrade from the latest 1.10.x to directly the latest 1.14.x ?
  • Does the consul agent v1.8.6 still compatible with consul server 1.10.x and 1.14.x ?

Thank you in advance for your help.
Lud

Hi @lud97x ,

I have asked HashiCorp support similar questions.

Unfortunately their usual response is to refuse to commit, and respond with some flavour of “you can test it yourself if you like but we still recommend what’s in the docs”.

Even when pressed, they won’t give me solid technical justifications for the specific intermediate versions they have selected. :frowning:

I have personally chosen to ignore the instructions to upgrade from 1.8.1 to latest 1.8.x before moving onwards in an upgrade I worked on, because I was able to determine from changelogs and supporting documentation, that that only applied to certain Enterprise licensing configurations. We moved straight from that to the latest 1.10.x at the time.

From 1.10.x to 1.14, I have no personal experience to share, although I see no reason why hopping straight to 1.14 couldn’t work, having reviewed changelogs - hence why I was trying, unsuccessfully, to get a yes or no from HashiCorp about whether there were any actual technical blockers.

Hi @maxb , thank for you reply, i have done some testing and been able to proceed my upgrade following this path:

  • server: 1.8.6 to 1.10.12 and 1.10.12 to 1.14.2
  • agent: once the servers were in 1.14.2, upgrade agent from 1.8.6 to 1.14.2

We use only consul for discovery so consul connect and peering have been disabled on the server side.

No majors issues encounter during the upgrade except CPU saturation during rhe agent upgrade on one of our big cluster ( + 2000 members)

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