why am i up so early this morning?
Well, its not just me who is up. My entire team came into work this morning at 6AM, on a Saturday! That's right, at the crack of dawn. It wasn't even light out yet.
With a few dozen donuts, bananas, and gallons of coffee, we started our ColdFusion 8 upgrade on all of our environments, that's over 20 servers.
So far it is going well. No real hiccups or problems. Our system administrator is the man. He had alot of things scripted out and a complete ColdFusion 8 Install Manual for our environments.
I will update when we get our servers (clusters) up and running.
UPDATE: 8:59 AM Two of our three clusters are now online!
UPDATE: 10:35 AM All done! We are now in the ColdFusion 8 world!
We first uninstall CF7, reboot (Windows), and then do a fresh install of CF8. If you want, you can email me off of this post and we can discuss more in detail. johann dot sonnenberg at gmail dot com
I would say we are not in the first or maybe even the second wave of CF8 adoption. We have had CF8 in dev for three months, and in test for one month. We are not just running a website or a single CF install. We are running extremely large and complex ColdFusion web applications. To be on the bleeding edge of a software release is not usually a good practice. We made sure we had adequate testing time for all of our applications. Also, some of the updaters that have come out since CF8 has come out, solved some of the problems we found. With early adopting any software, you get to use all the new features, but could also be you are dealing with issues that crop up without proper testing.
@Angus, upgrading lots of servers in a corporate or any kind of production environment takes time for many reasons. My own fear is rushing too fast to upgrade and not realising you missed a potential bug that could end up as a showstopper. The end result would be a dead or limping service, egg on your face, annoyed customers, angry stakeholders, loss of revenue, your own reputation taking a big knock, then not knowing how long it will take to get it fixed, trying to rollback to the previous version but then encountering a new unexpected problem, blah, blah... every CTO's nightmare.
The safest bet is wait a while to hear how the upgrade went for other businesses and learn from their experience. Also you need to justify why an upgrade is required and weigh it up against the expense, downtime, and the risk. Meanwhile the wait allows you to toy around with the new CF8 features, implement changes to your app and thoroughly test it out.
i realise you can export all the basic settings to a CAR file, but how do you deal about classpath stuff ?
We had all kinds of problems with Oracle and the thin drivers after we upgraded, so we had to roll back. :( The install however went very smooth.
We're hoping that when Updater 1 is released soon (crossing fingers) that all of our problems go away. I really want to be using cf8!