In late May, we advised all of our partners and customers about an upgrade to VIP servers and our back-end container orchestration system. Here’s what those changes will mean for all VIP sites:
- Next generation hardware: we’ll be upgrading our servers, which will improve performance overall.
- Improved auto-scaling: our upgraded system, with improved auto-scaling, will lead to better performance and faster response to sudden traffic spikes.
- Improved Security: we’ll be upgrading the version of MariaDB from 10.2 to 10.3 for all WordPress sites.
- Faster data syncs: syncing the database from your production to your non-production environments will be faster on our new infrastructure.
Revised Schedule
The process of upgrading all VIP sites to our new infrastructure was initially scheduled to conclude on June 30. Based on a few issues we encountered with a small number of migrating sites, we decided to take a cautious, more incremental approach. More than 50% of launched VIP sites have completed the migration, and we now expect the remaining upgrades to complete in the coming several weeks, beginning today.
What to expect
The main impact to keep in mind is the fact that during the process, a database replica running on our new system will be promoted to primary, and there will be a few moments where the old database container will be in read-only mode before the new primary database will accept writes. We anticipate that this will be less than 60 seconds.
During the primary promotion window, logged-in users may briefly see a message indicating that the site is being upgraded. For the overwhelming majority of sites, we don’t anticipate any front-end downtime.
AUTOMATED INGESTION
If your site or network of sites ingests content in an automated way, for instance via the REST API or by polling a feed on an automated schedule, then please note that any attempt to create, update or delete content will fail during the primary promotion window. If your ingestion or syndication setup handles such failures predictably and retries them, then you should experience no disruption. If this is not the case for you, please let us know about your particular situation. We expect this to be a concern primarily for applications that constantly push or pull large volumes of posts or other content every minute.
FRONT-END WRITES
VIP recommends against using functions on the front-end that do database writes. If your site does database writes on the front-end, visitors may see 500 errors for uncached requests during the primary promotion window.
What do I need to do?
No action is required. All of the features in the VIP Dashboard will continue to work as normal, and workflows for publishing, editing, and deploying code will remain unchanged.
Questions?
If you have any technical questions about this transition or its potential impacts on your application, please open a support ticket and we’ll be glad to assist.
If you are a Premier customer, your account team will reach out to you about this transition. Otherwise, feel free to contact your account representative directly or open a support ticket if you would like to discuss this upgrade in more detail.
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