Weather permitting, we will be moving most Stack Exchange operations to our new New York data center facility on Saturday Feb 9th, 2013.
A high level overview (a.k.a. “THE PLAN”) of what will happen on Friday night and Saturday:
- 02:00 UTC Saturday
- Restoring the latest full backups from Oregon (OR)
- 15:00 UTC Saturday
- We’ll do a go/no-go check with Internap (our colo) in New York due to the blizzard there.
- Restore the latest transactional backups from OR
- Slave our redis caching servers in NY to pull from the OR live servers
- 16:45 UTC Saturday
- Restore another batch of transactional backups from OR
- 17:00 UTC Saturday
- A final go/no-go decision will be made with the latest info from Internap
- Careers ads will dissapear from Stack Overflow
- Read-only mode engaged for Q&A Sites + Careers
- All live cache layer data will be persisted
- Final database saves will be completed, then locked in read-only mode
- CDN will be re-pointed to New York
- Final transaction logs moved to New York and restored
- New York databases recovered and added to AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and brought out of read-only mode
- DNS changeover to our New York IPs
Here’s what you should expect to see while browsing the sites:
- 15:00 UTC Saturday
- A banner pointing to this blog post will appear on the main Q&A sites
- 17:00 UTC Saturday
- All sites (excluding chat) will enter a read-only mode
- 17:30 UTC - Soon™ after that Saturday
- You’ll be pointed to our New York data center, the sites should be back to normal
We hope all goes to plan, but fully expect to be extinguishing fires that arise as the result of our move in the hours that follow. If you see any major issues that haven’t been reported once we’re back up, please alert us with a post on meta.stackoverflow.com, we’ll be watching it closely.