Do you update your software frequently?
Is software update part of your CI/CD pipelines?
What is continuous update?
The issue with hard-coding software versions and not updating
Just to clarify this post is relevant to 3rd-party software and packages you import to your application (via apt, yum, pip, gem etc.. or downloading binary .jar etc..) also for OS versions
The wrong approach in my opinion is to statically add version numbers to imported packages and use the same OS version throughout your infrastructure and code
Why you ask?
Once your code work with other software (3rd-party) and tests are ok, you assume that the process is complete and resume working on your code
everything works until it doesn’t !
Scenario 1
let’s say you’re using java and a vulnerability is discovered and fixed with a new release, now you need to upgrade to new release but your runtime version is too far behind the latest version and cannot be upgraded
or better yet, you can upgrade but other components that communicate with your code is not compatible with the latest version
what do you do? oh yes, revert !
Scenario 2
the operating system is a few versions behind the latest, let’s say Ubuntu 18.04 and now you want to use Ubuntu 22.04 and your code is python 3.6
guess what Ubuntu 22.04 does not ship with the same python as Ubuntu 18.04
now you need to compile python 3.6 from source and install it to Ubuntu 22.04 and make sure to update the PATH to use python 3.6
Backlog
so now you decided to use python 10 instead of python 3.6 but what about pip packages? they are probably not compatible, why? because pip use the python version too
now go over your entire code and make sure every function works with new python version, then you’ll probably decide it’s too much work right now and not to upgrade
Solution
Simple, don’t freeze software updates!
if you keep your software up to date (including your OS) it forces you to adapt as you go! no need to upgrade or schedule upgrades because it’s a mindset, your software is evolving
stopping your software from evolving does not make sense, in fact it’s the opposite from what your job description is… developer
How to keep your software with latest version?
The answer is CD (continuous delivery)
CD means how fast, reliable and how frequent you deploy your code to production
So the goal is to deploy to production whenever you want and a few times per day, if you do that you know your code is in a releasable state
So using the latest release software while keeping a releasable state will make your job easier and your product better