Dear Wikitechians,
On
Wednesday March 1st, the SRE team
will run a planned data center switchover, moving all wikis from our
primary data center in Virginia to the secondary data center in Texas.
This is an important periodic test of our tools and procedures, to
ensure the wikis will continue to be available even in the event of
major technical issues in our primary home. It also gives all our SRE
and ops teams a chance to do maintenance and upgrades on systems in
Virginia that normally run 24 hours a day.
The switchover process requires a
brief read-only period for all Foundation-hosted wikis, which will start at
14:00 UTC on Wednesday March 1st,
and will last for a few minutes while we execute the migration as
efficiently as possible. All our public and private wikis will be
continuously available for reading as usual, but no one will be able to
save edits during the process. Users will see a notification of the
upcoming maintenance, and anyone still editing will be asked to try
again in a few minutes.
CommRel has already begun notifying
communities of the read-only window. A similar event will follow a few
weeks later, when we move back to Virginia. This is currently scheduled
for
Wednesday, April 26th.
If you like, you can follow along on the day in the public #wikimedia-operations channel on IRC (
instructions for joining here). To report any issues, you can reach us in #wikimedia-sre on IRC, or file a Phabricator ticket with the
datacenter-switchover tag (
pre-filled form here);
we'll be monitoring closely for reports of trouble during and after the
switchover. (If you're new to Phab, there's more information at
Phabricator/Help.) The switchover and its preparation are tracked tracked in Phabricator
Task T327920On
behalf of the SRE team, please excuse the disruption, and our thanks to
everyone in a number of departments who've been involved in planning
this work for the past weeks. Feel free to reply directly to me with any
questions.
Thank you,
--
Clément Goubert (they/them)
Senior SRE
Wikimedia Foundation