Upgrading environments

This page describes how to upgrade the Airflow version or Cloud Composer version that your environment runs.

During upgrade, Cloud Composer:

Re-deploys the Airflow scheduler and worker pods in a new Kubernetes namespace. After the upgrade is completed, Airflow will use a new MySQL database; the database name matches the Kubernetes namespace. The DAG run history is preserved.
Do not deploy workloads with KubernetesPodOperator into the new Kubernetes namespace.
Updates the Airflow airflow_db connection to point to the new Cloud SQL database.

These changes affect how you access pods and connect to the Cloud SQL database.

To access pods in the GKE cluster after upgrade, you need to use namespace-aware kubectl commands. For example, to list pods in the cluster, use kubectl get pods -A. To execute a command on a pod, use kubectl exec -n <NAMESPACE> ....
If you use Airflow connections and workloads that reference the SQL proxy directly, use the default namespace as part of the hostname: airflow-sqlproxy-service.default, not airflow-sqlproxy-service.

Upgrading Cloud Composer, does not change how you connect to the resources in your environment, such as Google Kubernetes Engine node VM IP addresses, Cloud SQL instance IP address, Cloud Storage bucket, or Airflow webserver domain name.

Before you begin

Upgrading environments is currently in beta. Make sure you've checked Enable Beta Features at the top-right of the Environments page.
The following role is required to upgrade: roles/editor or roles/composer.admin
Pause all DAGs and wait for in-progress tasks to finish before upgrading.
You can upgrade the Cloud Composer, the Airflow version, or both at the same time.
The Cloud Composer-Airflow combination that you are upgrading to must be a released version.
- For available upgrades, see Viewing available upgrades. To get the latest features and fixes, consider upgrading to the most recent Cloud Composer release.
- For the list of PyPI packages and customizations in a supported version, see the Cloud Composer version list.
  Before you upgrade, ensure that you know the differences between the current versions of Airflow and Cloud Composer and the versions that you're upgrading to. Incompatible changes can cause DAGs to break.

Limitations

You cannot downgrade to an earlier version of Cloud Composer or Airflow.
You can only upgrade to the latest Cloud Composer version within the same major version, such as composer-1.4.0-airflow-1.10.0 to composer-1.5.0-airflow-1.10.0. Upgrading from composer-1.4.0-airflow-1.10.0 to composer-2.0.0-airflow-1.10.0 is not permitted because the Cloud Composer major version changes from 1 to 2.
The image version that you upgrade to must support your environment's current Python version.
Currently, you cannot perform an image version upgrade on an environment that is in a project with VPC Service Controls enabled.
Composer environments not using private IP should not upgrade GKE to 1.14+. These versions have deprecated Swagger in favor of OpenAPI. A future Cloud Composer release will create clusters that use OpenAPI and will enable upgrading existing environments to GKE versions 1.14 and beyond.

Viewing available upgrades

To view Cloud Composer versions that you can upgrade to:

Console

Open the Environments page in the Google Cloud.
Open the Environments page
Click the environment Name.
In the Environment Configuration tab, click Upgrade Image Version.
For available versions, click the Cloud Composer Image version drop-down menu.

gcloud

gcloud beta composer environments list-upgrades ENVIRONMENT_NAME \
    --location LOCATION

where:

ENVIRONMENT_NAME is the name of the environment.
LOCATION is the Compute Engine region where the environment is located.

For example:

gcloud beta composer environments list-upgrades test-environment \
    --location us-central1
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                              AVAILABLE UPGRADES                             │
├──────────────────────────────┬──────────────────┬───────────────────────────┤
│        IMAGE VERSION         │ COMPOSER DEFAULT │ SUPPORTED PYTHON VERSIONS │
├──────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼───────────────────────────┤
│ composer-1.4.0-airflow-1.9.0 │ True             │ 2,3                       │
└──────────────────────────────┴──────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘

API

To view available versions using the Cloud Composer REST API, construct an imageVersions.list API request and provide the project and location in the form projects/{projectId}/locations/{locationId}.

For example:

GET https://composer.googleapis.com/v1/projects/test-project-id/locations/us-central1/imageVersions

{
  "imageVersions": [
    {
      "imageVersionId": "composer-1.4.2-airflow-1.10.0",
      "supportedPythonVersions": [
        "2",
        "3"
      ]
    },
    {
      "imageVersionId": "composer-1.4.2-airflow-1.9.0",
      "isDefault": true,
      "supportedPythonVersions": [
        "2",
        "3"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Upgrading the Cloud Composer version

To upgrade the version of Cloud Composer that your environment runs:

Console

Open the Environments page in the Google Cloud.
Open the Environments page
Click the environment Name to modify.
In the Environment Configuration tab, click Upgrade Image Version. Make sure you have enabled beta features, otherwise this button will not be visible.
Click the Cloud Composer Image version drop-down menu and select a version.
Click Submit.

gcloud

gcloud beta composer environments update ENVIRONMENT_NAME \
    --location LOCATION --image-version VERSION

where:

ENVIRONMENT_NAME is the name of the environment.
LOCATION is the Compute Engine region where the environment is located.
VERSION is the Cloud Composer version and Airflow version to use for your environment in the form composer-a.b.c-airflow-x.y.z or composer-a.b.c-airflow-x.y. If you do not specify the Airflow patch, the highest available patch version for the given major and minor version is used.

For example:

gcloud beta composer environments update test-environment \
    --location us-central1 --image-version composer-latest-airflow-1.10.1

API

To upgrade using the Cloud Composer REST API, construct an environments.patch API request. Provide the version in the form composer-a.b.c-airflow-x.y.z.

For example:

PATCH https://composer.googleapis.com/v1beta1/projects/test-project/locations/us-central1/environments/test-environment?updateMask=config.software_config.image_version

The request body includes the imageVersion:

{
  "config": {
    "softwareConfig": {
      "imageVersion": "composer-1.6.0-airflow-1.10.1"
    }
  }
}

Upgrading the Airflow version

When your environment is running the latest Cloud Composer version, you can use the Cloud SDK to upgrade only the Airflow version, for example to upgrade from composer-1.6.1-airflow-1.9.0 to composer-1.6.1-airflow-1.10.0.

gcloud beta composer environments update ENVIRONMENT_NAME \
--location LOCATION --airflow-version VERSION

where:

ENVIRONMENT_NAME is the name of the environment.
LOCATION is the Compute Engine region where the environment is located.
VERSION is the Airflow version to use for your environment in the form x.y.z or x.y.

Note: If you do not specify the Airflow patch version, the latest available patch version for the specified major and minor Airflow version is used.

For example:

gcloud beta composer environments update test-environment \
--location us-central1 --airflow-version=1.10.1