A distributed application may be updated by using information provided by the application to determine grouping, sequencing, and whether or not to advance an update sequence. The application may provide input to an update sequence, and may cause the update sequence to repair one or more replicas prior to updating. The update mechanism may be used to change the distributed application topology as well as make changes to the application executable code, application configuration, quest operating system, virtual machine, and host systems, among others. In some cases, the distributed application may use a quorum to determine which version is current, and the quorum may change during the update process.