An alternative to the in-place upgrade strategy is the expand and contract strategy. This strategy has become popular of late, thanks to the self-service nature of on-demand infrastructures, such as cloud computing or virtualization pools. The ability to create new servers on demand from a large pool of available resources means that every deployment of an application can happen on brand new systems. This strategy avoids a host of issues, such as a build up of cruft on long-running systems, like the following:
- Configuration files that are no longer managed by Ansible being left behind
- Runaway processes consuming resources in the background
- Changes being made to the server manually by human beings without updating ...
