[Yale ArchivesSpace] Restart Schedule for PROD/TEST/DEV

[Smith, Steelsen]

Hi All,

We've been asked by the vendor, Lyrasis, to identify a window during which the ArchivesSpace backing servers can be regularly restarted, much like the nightly maintenance window used by Orbis albeit with a very different interval.

YAMS has determined that we are amenable to a biweekly (the day after YAMS meetings) restart schedule for production and a weekly restart schedule for both test and dev. Since restarts will include updates to plugins and our custom build, it should make service interruptions more predictable and cut down on the amount of messaging related to ad-hoc changes.

Note that this schedule will only apply to updates and maintenance that will not result in significant downtime - we expect the scheduled downtime to be less than 10 minutes per event overall and usually less than 1 minute. Restarts or changes which require re-indexing or are anticipated to require longer periods of downtime will continue to happen over weekends.

This is the proposed schedule:
PROD: Biweekly on Wednesdays at 4am
TEST: Weekly on Wednesdays at 4am
DEV: Weekly on Wednesdays at 4am

What to expect:
A momentary (usually less than 1 minute, never over 10 minutes) outage of all ASpace functions including staff interface, public interface, and API. Since ASpace is stateless you should be able to resume your activity as soon as the service is back online, though data in-flight (e.g., you just hit the save button as the restart began) may be lost.

Why 4am Wednesday?
A weekday Wednesday timeslot ensures that Yale staff will be available to help with troubleshooting should anything go wrong (as opposed to a weekend) and is as close as possible to the IT maintenance window without interfering with staff work. Early mornings experience less public use than late nights and therefore this should be a low-activity period for the PUI as well. Finally, this avoids interfering with long-running maintenance jobs which may happen over a weekend.

As noted above, this change has been approved by YAMS. However, we would like to check in with those who manage integrating applications, and those who use ArchivesSpace, to determine if there are any objections to this new workflow before we give the vendor the all-clear. If I don't hear back by Wednesday 7/24 then I'll notify Lyrasis that we're good to go with the assumption that this schedule will take effect beginning 7/31 or 8/7 depending on timing on their end.

Thanks in advance!
Steelsen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/yulaspace/attachments/20190718/d0d0ad2f/attachment-0001.html>