Hi Folks,
I mentioned this in one of my Messages on the 7.0.0 Beta thread but thought I would formalise it here.
Having begun my second Protocol Transition with VisualCron (6.1.7 & now 7.0.0), it would be really ease deployment if I could run multiple clients on the same PC during transition or we had protocol backward compatibility.
We currently have a test server, and 8 production servers running visualcron.
With a 'normal' update (where the protocol remains the same) rollout is easy as the test server and then production servers can be rolled out progressively with full connectivity, and independent of users updating their client.
When the VisualCron protocol changes, life is much more interesting, as you lose connectivity to the servers as they are upgraded (with client unchanged), and then when you upgrade your client, you lose connectivity to your servers running the old protocol.
Plan (a) - Protocol Backward Compatibility
In a *perfect* world, the clients would be backward compatible with the old protocol and we would just pre-deploy the new client once tested, and we could then progressively roll the servers out whilst maintaining full connectivity to all clients from the server.
I understand this ratchets up the complexity / testing
Plan (b) - Multiple Clients can be installed
*alternatively* I would like to be able to install and run multiple clients. This would allow (pre)deployment installation of the new client for end users, and then deploy to the production servers progressively. Once deployment is complete we can clean up the old clients at leisure.
Without this, to avoid disruption we are finding that we have to compress the deployment when the protocol changes (server and client), which is not ideal.
From a risk perspective we would ideally not
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Obviously the current solution (single protocol support in the client) eases introduction of new functionality and tasks that require protocol changes, but I want to highlight that as you make more use of VisualCron the difficulty in deploying the solution as a result goes up when the protocol changes.