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TopAnswers is moving to AWS

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Jack Douglas

For many years I've rented a quarter-rack for some clients, and TopAnswers ran in a VM on a server in there. My contract with the data centre is up at the end of January and I'm not planning to renew, so TopAnswers needs to move to a new home.

The plan is to split the application and database and:

1. move the database to RDS Aurora
2. move the application to an EC2

I don't know the precise timing yet, but I hope it will all happen in the quiet period over the next week or two, and only involve an hour or so downtime during the database migration. I'll update this post after each step is completed, and please let me know in here if you hit any issues during the move.

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Progress:

* 2022-12-26: The database has moved to Aurora. Downtime started at 12:10 and finished at 13:20 UTC. It looks like some things might be quicker and some slower on Aurora - please let us know if you find anything has got noticeably slower and we'll look into it.
* 2022-12-27: The new webserver on AWS is up and running - I'm using it to make this edit. ~~I'm about to switch the DNS.~~ I've switched the DNS ~~and am seeing some traffic right away on the new server~~. Seeing as all the traffic is on the new server after about 5 minutes, I've shut down the old server and the move is now complete. Any problems please let me know in here.

you are right - and although I've fixed a bug there is still another issue: AWS blocks traffic on port 25 by default from EC2 instances. I've filled in the application form for the block to be lifted but I'm not sure how long it takes - until then emails are just going to queue :(

Sounds like good news for all non-Europe-based user :) Tiny detail: Could it be that the email notifications aren't working since the move? I didn't get an email for your chat message https://topanswers.xyz/transcript?room=2196&id=145195#c145195 nor for https://topanswers.xyz/transcript?room=347&id=145063#c145063 (and yes, I did check my spam folder :) )

Thanks! I've tweaked the text. In case you are interested, "primarily using the London (eu-west-2) region" is because CloudFront is a global service, and when we start using it there will be caching outside of the London region. The benefit should be very significantly improved latency for countries outside Europe as SSL adds 3 extra round trips currently. The actual database is going to remain London-only however.

@Jack Everything seems to work fine. Very smooth move - thanks! No idea where the new servers are physically located - could you check if the footline on the front page https://topanswers.xyz > TopAnswers is based in the UK, with servers in a data centre in Reading. now needs an update?

It was pretty smooth (Art could tell you more) -- set up everything on the new server, copied some data to test with, and then when we were ready and had a good window, did the final move (read-only, copy DB, update DNS).

We updated the original post as we went instead of making a new one: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/286582 . I'm going to be putting together another newsletter soon (email and post) and we'll talk about it there too.