MOVING THREE RINGS' SERVERS
2024-12-12
Yesterday, I fulfilled the primary Three Rings objective I set for myself when
I kicked off my sabbatical twelve weeks ago and migrated the entire
application to a new hosting provider (making a stack of related improvements
along the way).
IMG Network diagram but with entities having faces and named Chungus, Atul, Summer, Gwen, Alice, Astrid, and Demmy.
I did some work on this project during my Three Rings-focussed International
Volunteer Day last week, but it feels like I've been working on it for much
longer than that. And it feels like it... because I have been.
Months prior, I was comparing different providers and their relative merits,
making sure that our (quirky and specific) needs could be met. Weeks
beforehand, I was running a "dry run" every four or five days, streamlining
the process of moving the ~450GB (Three Rings' user data is represented by a
little under 70GB of MariaDB databases plus about 380GB of organisational
storage: volunteer photos, files, email attachments, and the like. Certainly
not massive by comparison to, say, social media sites, search engines, and
larger eCommerce platforms... but large enough that moving it takes a little
planning!) of live data while minimising downtime. Days before the event felt
like the countdown for a rocket launch, with final preparations underway:
reducing DNS time-to-lives, ensuring users knew about our downtime window, and
generally fitting in a little time to panic.
IMG Terminal screenshot showing a directory listing of a logs directory with several gzipped logfiles with different date-stamped suffixes, and the contents of the logrotate configuration file that produced them.
It's challenging to pull off a "big", intensive operation like this in an
entirely voluntary operation. I'm not saying I couldn't have done it were I
not on sabbatical, but it'd certainly have been harder and riskier.
But then, I also couldn't have done it without the kickass team of volunteers
I've surrounded myself with. I guess the real success story here is in the
power of a well-aligned team and in volunteer effort.
LINKS
HTML Three Rings
HTML I kicked off my sabbatical twelve weeks ago
HTML The smiley faces and names my 10-year-old annotated it with
HTML Did some work on this project
HTML My Three Rings-focussed International Volunteer Day last week
HTML My more-successful recent second attempt at secret-cabinet-making
HTML The kickass team of volunteers I've surrounded myself with