Planned downtime will start at 23:00hrs on the 4th December 2016.
The downtime could potentially last for 4-12 hours.
UPDATE: We expect the cloud service to be up and running within 30 mins however it could still take 4 – 12 hours. We will post here and on twitter when the maintenance has been completed and potentially follow it up with a post.
Notice:
During the server migration process eLOQ Enterprise and the affiliated cloud services will be offline and unreachable. We would like to mitigate any inconvenience the server migration might cause our customers, so we would like to advise our customers to do the following before 23:00hrs on the 4th of Dec 2016.
- Issue or remove any user keys before the planned downtime.
- Manage user re-validation periods to make sure user keys do not need re-validating during the planned downtime.
- Making and saving any changes on the system before the planned downtime.
ANY CHANGES MADE TO THE PLATFORM MADE AFTER 23:00HRS WILL NOT BE SAVED!
Taking these precautionary measures will reduce any service disruption during the planned downtime.
Any updates regarding this downtime will be put into this post as well as being informed via our eLOQ Twitter.
What it is all about:
We would like to inform our customers about a planned downtime that could affect eLOQ Enterprise for a time period of 4 – 12 hrs starting from 23:00hrs on the 4th December 2016. During the planned downtime eLOQ Enterprise will be unavailable to customers for the duration of the downtime.
eLOQ Enterprise runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Currently our servers are Azure servers located in Dublin, Ireland. We chose to host our servers in Dublin because Microsoft Azure did not offer UK data centres when eLOQ Enterprise was initially offered to our customers.
Microsoft Azure has recently opened 3 new data centres in the UK located in London, Durham and Cardiff. So we have decided to move our servers from Microsoft Azure data centres in Dublin to London.
This move means all our customer data will be held in UK instead of the Dublin which would ensure that the data protection policies complied with UK regulations instead that of the EU.
Microsoft Azure UK has gained the UK government’s “Official” security credentials and is UK G-Cloud approved.
The MoD(Ministry of Defence) and NHS(National Health Service) have adopted Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure in the UK as a result. For more information, follow this link to the BBC article on the same. We would like to offer our customers only the best in safety and service and nothing less.
Reason for the downtime:
Moving our servers from Dublin to London is a complex manual affair with little to no room for any error what so ever. So we will have to carry out the server migration with utmost care and make sure everything is working as it should once the server migration is done, this takes time.
The server migration process requires us to
- Take eLOQ Enterprise and our other cloud services offline.
- Setup the cloud environment in the London Microsoft Azure data centre.
- Migrate the servers from Dublin to London all the while maintaining a fall back service in Dublin
- Making sure everything is working as it should.
- Make sure our DNS servers point to eLOQ Enterprise hosted on the London Microsoft Azure data centre.
- Perform a final round of tests
- Bring the service back online
And the whole process takes anywhere between 4- 12 hours in total.