In the coming weeks, we’ll be upgrading VIP servers and our back-end container orchestration system.
What is changing?
- 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.
Upgrade schedule
We’ve already begun the process of upgrading un-launched sites and expect to have all un-launched sites upgraded by June 5th.
All Launched VIP Sites will be upgraded between June 1st and June 30 with the majority taking place between June 7 and June 18. We aren’t able to provide specific dates and times for individual customers, or postpone upgrades, but we’ll be actively monitoring during the upgrade process to ensure minimal impact to all live sites. All environments for each site will be upgraded at the same time, as some platform features rely on both production and non-production environments residing on the same system.
If you’d like your site to be among the first to upgrade, between June 1 and June 5, please open a support ticket and let us know and we can consider your site and coordinate details.
We’ll be sending out individual notifications to each customer once all of their sites have been upgraded.
What to expect
We expect the disruption from upgrades to be minimal. 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 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.
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 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.
WordPress VIP Lobby 