Upgrade Tyk on Kubernetes

After reviewing guidelines for preparing for upgrade, follow the instructions below to upgrade your Tyk components and plugins.

Upgrade order: Please note that upgrade order is as explained in the upgrade overview

Simple Kubernetes Environment Upgrade

When upgrading a non-production environment, where it’s okay to have a brief downtime and you can simply restart your gateways, the upgrade is trivial as with any other image you want to upgrade in Kubernetes:

In a similar way to docker:

1. Backup your gateway config file (tyk.conf or the name you chose for it)
2. Update the image version in the manifest file.
3. Apply the file/s using kubectl

$ kubectl apply -f .

You will see that the deployment has changed.

Now you can check the gateway pod to see the latest events (do kubectl get pods to get the pod name):

$ kubectl describe pods <gateway pod name>

You should see that the image was pulled, the container got created and the gateway started running again, similar to the following output:

Events:
  Type    Reason     Age   From               Message
  ----    ------     ----  ----               -------
  Normal  Scheduled  118s  default-scheduler  Successfully assigned tyk/tyk-gtw-89dc9f554-5487c to docker-desktop
  Normal  Pulling    117s  kubelet            Pulling image "tykio/tyk-gateway:v5.0"
  Normal  Pulled     70s   kubelet            Successfully pulled image "tykio/tyk-gateway:v5.0" in 47.245940479s
  Normal  Created    70s   kubelet            Created container tyk-gtw
  Normal  Started    70s   kubelet            Started container tyk-gtw

4. Check the log to see that the new version is used and if the gateway is up and running

$ kubectl logs service/gateway-svc-tyk-gateway-tyk-headless --tail=100 --follow 
Defaulted container "gateway-tyk-headless" out of: gateway-tyk-headless, setup-directories (init)
time="Jul 17 20:58:27" level=info msg="Tyk API Gateway 5.1.0" prefix=main
...

5. Check the gateway is healthy

$ curl  localhost:8080/hello | jq .
{
  "status": "pass",
  "version": "5.1.0",
  "description": "Tyk GW",
  "details": {
    "redis": {
      "status": "pass",
      "componentType": "datastore",
      "time": "2023-07-17T21:07:27Z"
    }
  }
}

Upgrade Tyk K8S Demo deployment

1. In the Tyk k8s Demo repo, change the version in .env file, GATEWAY_VERSION=v5.1 to the version you want
2. Restart the deployment
3. Check the log file