Major upgrades and minor upgrades are a thing of the past. These methods are common for on premises applications where versions upgrades are costly and unstable. Usually, it is a three months efforts for minor version to a year for major upgrade. In your cloud application, it is common to see upgrade in another form. This is because you will be pushed to upgrade to a higher version.
Managing Cloud Upgrade
If you are not familiar to Cloud upgrade, you will be in for a surprise. Cloud upgrade is similar to your mobile OS upgrade. You will be notified of the newer version and its details. Then, you will be recommended “update” to the higher version. Similarly, your cloud application upgrade will be in the same process. The risk is that some of your application may break after the upgrade. Unfortunately, you cannot rollback to the other version.
Reducing Risk
The key part of Cloud applications is the ability to clone, export and import the configuration. Cloning allows you to upgrade for your testing environment and resolve pending issues before making the change in production. Another way is update your application to the latest version incrementally. This reduces the probability of big changes of the new version to your current one.
Be prepared for cloud upgrade similar to what you are facing in your mobile OS upgrade. You need to manage upgrades more often in order to reduce your risk exposure.
Danny Kwok 