created by Geraldine_VdAuwera
on 2016-04-13
The company that hosts our forums will be performing some maintenance and upgrades on the servers tomorrow, Thursday May 14th. Based on the notification they sent us (included below), we should expect the forums to be unavailable for about ~45 minutes at some point between 2pm and 8pm EST.
During that time, most of the cached GATK documentation will remain available through the Guide section of the GATK website. However, some pages may show error messages and some blog content may not be available, and of course during that time it will not be possible to ask or answer questions on the forum.
Thanks for your patience, and let's all look forward to improved reliability of our forum service.
Notification from our host regarding the planned maintenance:
Starting at 2PM Eastern Time on May 14th, Vanilla's hosting environment will be in a maintenance window for 6 hours. During this time, all nodes in the environment will be rebooted at least once and there will be some instance downtime, which will impact customer forums. We expect the actual down time to last for approximately 45 minutes.
Vanilla is running a virtualized environment on top of the Openstack cloud operating system. Every 6 months a new version of this operating system is released. Vanilla assesses these releases and determines whether or not to upgrade based on the merits of the new features vs. the cost of performing a maintenance with downtime. We have delayed upgrading for the last 2 releases but believe that the version currently available is worth adopting.
During this maintenance period we will also be applying firmware updates to a portion of our compute nodes in order to avoid recently discovered vulnerabilities in their RAID controllers which could cause an outage in the future. This seems like an opportune moment to preemptively get those in.
We expect this OS upgrade to solve some long standing pain points for us and improve our ability to provide consistently high uptime for our customers, so we are excited to move ahead.
Thank you for your understanding!