Data center migration plan

02 Oct 2018 by Johan Eckerström

Information about an upcoming data center migration.

TL;DR

• We are doing a data center migration for our blog data systems
• Make sure you are subscribed to updates on status.twingly.com
• There will be some amount of downtime when we promote the new data center to primary

Migration plan

Twingly will be moving servers from one data center (LKP) to a new data center (STH). This data center is mainly used for our blog data services.

As we have enough servers to keep the services running at full capacity during the migration, we don’t expect any extended period of downtime. Even though our systems will work at full speed, the risk of outages is increased during this period.

When we make the logical switch from the old data center to the new data center, there will be a short amount of planned downtime. This will be announced in advance through status.twingly.com.

Affected services:

• Twingly Blog Search API - Slight delays in new data, shorter outage (hosted in data center)
• Twingly Blog LiveFeed API - Slight delays in new data, shorter outage (hosted in data center)
• Twingly Blog Box - Slight delays in new links (hosted outside the data center)

We are doing the migration in three steps.

1. Setup network environment at new data center
   • New network equipment is purchased and installed
   • This step has already been completed
2. Physically move about half of the servers
   • Once online in STH, the servers will replicate data from LKP
   • Wait for the data to be in sync
   • Make STH the primary data center by updating DNS records (api.twingly.com)
   • Verify that everything is working as intended
   • Servers in LKP are powered down
3. Move the rest of the servers, done!