Sidecar upgrades
When to upgrade
Sidecar upgrades should be done at least twice per year and are performed by your team. Sidecar upgrades are initiated in the Cyral UI and carried out in your organization's deployment infrastructure, such as CloudFormation, Terraform, or Helm3. Cyral customer support is available to assist remotely. Upgrading a sidecar takes about one hour.
Version compatibility
Cyral guarantees compatibility between the current version of the Cyral control plane and the three most recent versions of the sidecar. Cyral recommends that you maintain sidecar version-parity with the Cyral control plane version.
For some newly released control plane features, you must upgrade the sidecar to the same version in order to use the feature.
How to upgrade the sidecar
Cyral sidecars support two upgrade approaches:
Rolling upgrade keeps the sidecar consistently available, but existing data client connections will be broken.
Parallel upgrade, also known as a blue-green style upgrade that allows you to delay breaking of data client connections until a suitable outage window. This upgrade approach is suitable if your deployment includes applications that are not tolerant to network/database disconnections.
Control plane upgrades
Control plane upgrades should be done at least once per quarter. Downtime is not required for most control plane upgrades. How the upgrade is done depends on your deployment model:
For the Cyral SaaS control plane, Cyral customer support gets your administrator's approval and then performs the upgrade.
For the self-hosted Cyral control plane, Cyral customer support assists your team in performing the upgrade.
See also
To increase sidecar throughput, see Increasing Cyral sidecar capacity to support a higher query volume.
