Service Updates
Microsoft’s service updates are continuous and touchless, providing new features and functionality. These updates eliminate the need for expensive upgrades every few years and maintain backward compatibility, so there’s no need to merge your code.
Here are some major updates on how you upgrade your system after 10.0.37 and the beginning of 10.0.39:
- Customers can choose to pause one update at a time.
- The number of service updates released annually is being reduced from seven to four. Customers can take up to four service updates per year and are required to take a minimum of two per year.
- In case of multiple sandboxes, customers have to define which is the designated UAT sandbox to be used for production upgrade. A sandbox auto-update occurs seven days before the production update.
- Microsoft is releasing four service updates annually, in February, April, July, and October.
- In LCS, there are two auto-update dates. If customers did not upgrade their system, Microsoft will auto upgrade them based on settings in LCS. Beginning version 10.0.39, the service update auto-update window is divided into two windows that are separated by approximately a four-week gap.
The First Release Program
The First Release program is open to all customers. Customers who join it are the first, select group of customers to take the service update all the way to production. Microsoft manages the deployment of this service update to a UAT sandbox environment and then auto-deploys the update to production seven days later. Customers who participate in this program gain the benefit of having dedicated Microsoft engineers closely monitor the environments for any issues after updates are applied.
Regulatory Updates
A regulatory update is a new feature, or a change to an existing feature, that’s required by law, usually for a specific country or region. A regulatory update is always required by a specific law enforcement date (LED) and should be enabled by that date or earlier.
Expected Downtime During an Auto-update
The expected downtime for a successful update is approximately 15 minutes. However, Microsoft asks for three hours of downtime in case issues occur while the update is being applied.
PQUs
PQUs are cumulative builds of hotfixes that are delivered with near-zero downtime. PQUs follow a push model, where updates are applied to a Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services environment in the background and have minimal impact on customers. Every PQU is deployed region by region, by following a “safe deployment process” that tracks issues that are found within each region during deployment. The safe deployment process helps identify and fix issues before the PQU is deployed to more regions. PQUs are 100-percent automated and contain important bug fixes that are ready after the service update is generally available.
That’s all for today! Stay tuned for more updates and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook to keep in rhythm with us.
Best, Harry
