2 June 2023 Update:
Database updates for production environments will resume starting 7 June 2023. If you have any questions, please open a ticket with our support team and we’ll be happy to assist.
1 May 2023 Update:
Database updates for production environments have been delayed and some sites will still be running MariaDB 10.3 past the May 25 End of Life date. Customers impacted by the delay have been notified via email and updates will be shared as they become available. WordPress VIP will continue to apply security updates to sites running MariaDB 10.3 as needed. If you have any questions, please open a ticket with our support team and we’ll be happy to assist.
In advance of MariaDB 10.3 reaching end of life, databases for all sites running on the WordPress VIP platform will be upgraded from MariaDB 10.3 to MySQL 8 beginning on Monday, February 6th, 2023.
Upgrade schedule
We plan to take a phased approach with this upgrade, to provide customers an opportunity to test non-production ahead of the production upgrade date.
- Development environments will be upgraded between 6th-17th February
- From February 6th, all newly created sites will be initialized with MySQL 8
- This includes new production environments, as well as non-production environments for existing sites.
- Additional non-production environments will be upgraded starting the week of 20th February.
- Updates to production environments will begin 13th March.
You will receive an email outlining the upgrade timeline for your sites. We aren’t able to customize dates and times for individual customers or postpone upgrades. We will be actively monitoring during the production upgrade process to ensure minimal impact on all live sites.
What should I expect?
Minimal disruption is expected. Customers who wish to test should be prepared to run through their testing workflows on non-production environments after the week of 6th February in advance of the production upgrade date starting 13th March.
During the production database upgrade, there will be a few seconds where the old database container will be in read-only mode before the new primary database will accept writes. Logged-in users may briefly see a message indicating that the site is being upgraded. For most 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.
Questions?
If you have any questions or would like your site(s) to be among the first to upgrade, please open a support ticket and we’ll be glad to assist.
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