Pega Upgrade from 8.23.2 to 25

General
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1

Hi Team, Our app is in 8.23.2 version currently, we are working on pega upgrade 25 need a step by step guide to upgrade into 25.

2

@VigneshSabarisanP

Hi there — thanks for reaching out! We have a comprehensive step‑by‑step upgrade guide available on our documentation site, which covers everything from preparation to execution.

Documentation: Install and update Pega Platform

To make sure we point you to the most relevant details, could you confirm:

  • Are you running on Pega Cloud or on‑prem/self‑managed?
  • Are you planning to migrate to Constellation UI, or are you already using it?
3

Hello Marc,
Good day. We are planning a similar upgrade from on premise 24.1.1 (VM Based installation -on premise self managed) to 25.1.2 (on premise/self managed).
We would not be using constellation
The infra team has not much experience in Pega upgrades and with Kubernetes setup from 25 onwards , is there a specific step by step guide on how to move to 25 with such infrastructure. We from application development team also don’t have much expertise on it. I appreciate any help or guidance on how to make it happen.

4

I believe the guidance you’re looking for is already covered in the documentation linked earlier. In particular, I think you’ll find the following section useful for understanding the infrastructure changes required from Pega Platform 25 onwards:

Adopting Pega Platform infrastructure changes

Externalization of services in your deployment

This applies to self‑managed, VM‑based environments moving to 25, even if you’re not planning to use Constellation.

Please let us know if you have any specific questions.

5

Thank you Marc for your response. While we are actively reviewing the documentation, had a question about setting up external Elastic Search and Kafka. Currently we are on 24.1.1 on PREM VM setup. Is it a must have to setup external Kafka && the SRS?
within SRS it mentions of 2 steps , do we need to do both?

6

You will need externalized infrastructure starting with 24.2. You can go externalized with externalized and Kubernetes before 24.2. Externalization is “must have” for 24.2 for Kafka and for ElasticSearch. SRS is a Pega-provided Docker image that is by default operated with Kubernetes. Kubernetes based on Pega-provided Docker images is a must for 25.1 and higher. Constellation is also provided via Docker images.

VM-based services hybrid with Docker (if you want to avoid self-operated Kubernetes) can make sense mostly for use of Constellation in context of VMs, since Constellation is Docker-image-provided only.

Best option to avoid complexity of this self-service installation, operation and maintenance of this infrastructure is “Pega-as-a-Service (Pega Cloud)”, where Pega takes most of the operations complexity that come with high reliability, resilience, (auto-)scalability and automation on top of large infrastructure providers (multi-cloud support with AWS or GCP).