Nutanix Objects 1.0 was released with Nutanix AOS 5.11 release. Even though it runs on AOS and is enabled via Nutanix Prism Central, Objects releases are completely independent of AOS releases.
If there are any cool features coming up with next version of Objects, then you don’t have to wait for any AOS release to consume them. Objects is well integrated with well known Nutanix LCM framework and upgrades are handled independent of AOS/PC upgrades.
While LCM helps to release Objects on its own, it also gives flexibility to build proper dependency. So in case your Objects new version depends on any specific capability of AOS or Prism Central, LCM can identify that and guide the user to follow specific upgrade sequence.
Objects 1.0.1 is released on Oct-10th 2019. In this article, we will take a closer look at upgrading Objects cluster to the latest version.
Objects cluster comprises of two main components:
- Objects Manager
- Objects Services
Objects Manager:
If you have gone through this post for enabling Objects service which is the first step in deployment, then post service enablement you will see two new services started on Nutanix Prism Central.
- Aoss_service_manager
- Msp_controller
- Aoss Service Manager :
This is the Objects Manager and is responsible for providing management interface to manage your Objects cluster. This service is also responsible for providing Objects UI and taking care of deployment and upgrade of your Objects cluster.
Like all other services, Objects Manager is also fully containerized. You can check this in the “docker ps” command on your Prism Central.
Objects Manager provides simple user interface for providing many backend functionalities such as creating bucket, configuring life cycle policies or enabling WORM/versioning on buckets. It also gives you various critical statistics for analyzing your Objects performance.
Objects Manager has a complete view of your one to many Objects cluster that you have deployed on one to many AOS clusters. Life cycle management and compatibility matrix is taken care of by this service.
- MSP Controller :
In the above screenshot, you also see “MSP Controller” service. This service is responsible for deploying the Microservices platform which is later used for deploying Objects cluster.
Objects Services
Objects Manager provides an easy way to deploy Microservice Platform and deploys Objects services to provide S3 services to users.
Your Objects cluster is made up of a few services (brief info is given here), which are containerized and deployed on Microservices Platform.
When it comes to upgrading your Objects cluster, you will have to look into two main components to upgrade i.e Objects Manager and Objects Services.
There are two ways Nutanix releases upgrades for the Objects cluster.
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Upgrade with AOS release: Even though Objects releases are planned independent of AOS releases, but if these two releases happen to be at the same time, then you will always get the latest Objects bundled with the AOS release. Upgrading your AOS and Prism Central bits to latest would give you an option to upgrade the Objects Manager and Services from the LCM UI.
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Upgrade LCM version: New version of LCM is released every two weeks. And this is the easiest way to get the latest Objects build on your cluster.When user runs LCM inventory operation, the LCM framework is auto-upgraded to latest version and it will detect if there is any new Objects version available and will give you option to upgrade it.