Traditionally upgrades haven’t been a task sysadmins relish. In days gone by, the chances of breaking a perfectly functional application was quite high, and it usually wasn’t until the risks posed by a security threat outweighed the risks of a system outage that admins begrudgingly relented. Unless upgrades involve some kind of security patch, many sysadmins will avoid feature only upgrades. In today’s environment, that is often selling your users short, or making inevitable upgrades all the more daunting, the more often you skip incremental upgrades.

Fortunately the landscape has changed significantly, and many upgrades are a five minute affair, with near instantaneous rollback when hosting on enterprise cloud services such as Amazon Web Services.

Github in particular have made Github Enterprise upgrades extremely easy, with a simple to follow step by step guide, and near automated process. Pivotal to this is AWS AMI snapshots that allow you to snapshot your data volume and GitHub Enterprise instance. In the rare event of an upgrade failure, you can restore your data and instance within a couple of minutes. The whole upgrade process takes about 10 minutes at most.

Snapshot your data and instance. Download the upgrade on the instance, then ghe-upgrade with the new package after putting your site into maintenance mode.

Github provide full instructions here for their 2.3 release: https://help.github.com/enterprise/2.3/admin/guides/installation/upgrading-the-github-enterprise-virtual-machine/ 

The real payoffs for this effortless process is peace of mind knowing your systems are less prone to known security threats. New features allow your team to be more effective in their jobs, by taking advantage of the latest advances. In many cases, new revisions allow you to improve your automation processes. This is definitely the case with Github Enterprise 2.3, which adds a new admin API as documented in enterprise 2.3 API docs: https://developer.github.com/enterprise/2.3/  

Perhaps more compelling than any of these underlying factors is the simple fact that the more often you incrementally upgrade, the less daunting upgrades become. You soon become so familiar with the process, rather than being something you’d rather do another day, it’s something you’re happy to spend 5 minutes doing as upgrades become available.

For a full rundown on what’s new in GitHub Enterprise 2.3.0, be sure to check out the official release notes: https://enterprise.github.com/releases/2.3.0